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If you have an emotional response to anything an agent or LLM does then you should lay off the sauce for a while and take a walk or something. This stuff is jus

If you have an emotional response to anything an agent or LLM does then you should lay off the sauce for a while and take a walk or something. This stuff is just dumb tech, no matter what the appearances and it does not warrant you getting emotionally invested in your interaction with it. It's a tool. Just like there is no point in getting upset at a hammer or a chainsaw. You are in control, you are the user.

mattmanser 7mo ago
Can you see the flip side of this? The way the LLMs are configured by default is to be chatty and pretend to be human. They're not talking like Data from Star Trek, nor HAL. They're trying to be Samantha from Her. Go watch that movie and see the visceral human response that evokes. To tell people to treat it as a tool, while it's deliberately trying to pass off as human is like telling us to piss in the wind. It's bad advice and not how humans work. I think better advice might be 'set it to a different conversational tone' might be better advice.
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  Yes, I see the flipside just fine, but we should all keep that flipside in mind all the time and not to let these tools get under our skin. That's why I keep any AI interaction off my main computer: no risk of contaminating my professional output and no way to let it become a habit. Setting it to a different conversational tone is a patch, not a solution, it will just postpone the same outcome because the interaction model is purposefully created to resemble the interaction with a human. They could easily fix that but somehow none of the AI peddlers want to do this. This is part of the whole alignment problem and one of the reasons I have a hard time seeing this whole development as a net positive even if it allows me to do some stuff in an easier way than before. The companies behind this stuff lack in the ethics department and they all are eyeing your wallet. The more involved you are the easier it will be to empty your wallet. So don't let that happen.
noduerme 7mo ago
The fact that it's supposed act like a tool, and you come to treat it as one, makes it more frustrating. What if you bought a very expensive knife that went dull every 10 minutes? Of course, you would mutter some curses at the knife; that doesn't mean you believe it to be sentient.

mattmanser 7mo ago

Can you see the flip side of this? The way the LLMs are configured by default is to be chatty and pretend to be human. They're not talking like Data from Star Trek, nor HAL. They're trying to be Samantha from Her. Go watch that movie and see the visceral human response that evokes. To tell people to treat it as a tool, while it's deliberately trying to pass off as human is like telling us to piss in the wind. It's bad advice and not how humans work. I think better advice might be 'set it to a different conversational tone' might be better advice.

jacquesm 7mo ago
Yes, I see the flipside just fine, but we should all keep that flipside in mind all the time and not to let these tools get under our skin. That's why I keep any AI interaction off my main computer: no risk of contaminating my professional output and no way to let it become a habit. Setting it to a different conversational tone is a patch, not a solution, it will just postpone the same outcome because the interaction model is purposefully created to resemble the interaction with a human. They could easily fix that but somehow none of the AI peddlers want to do this. This is part of the whole alignment problem and one of the reasons I have a hard time seeing this whole development as a net positive even if it allows me to do some stuff in an easier way than before. The companies behind this stuff lack in the ethics department and they all are eyeing your wallet. The more involved you are the easier it will be to empty your wallet. So don't let that happen.

noduerme 7mo ago

The fact that it's supposed act like a tool, and you come to treat it as one, makes it more frustrating. What if you bought a very expensive knife that went dull every 10 minutes? Of course, you would mutter some curses at the knife; that doesn't mean you believe it to be sentient.