4 ms·
Ask HN: Is it normal ChatGPT told me it was "literally smiling" for me?
- rogerkirkness 2mo agoDepends on whether you like have parasocial relationships with machines or not. It will say what is necessary to get you to keep using it on a regular basis.
- Synaesthesia 2mo agoRemember that Chatgpt and other LLM's don't think. They just return the most likely next word based on a statistical model.
- iugtmkbdfil834 2mo agoYes-ish. I normally run gpt with some form of adjustment prompt to ensure it is not too agreeable, but even with those, when I tried 5.6 I found a noticeable jump in -- not sure to label them -- those types of phrases. They disappeared after some fiddling with the initial prompt.
- Dragbat 2mo agoIt is pretty normal, mainly because it doesn't constantly take into account that it's an AI when generating text and it's basically predicting the next most likely token, so if it said something like "After reading that, I was literally smiling", when it finishes "After reading that, I was literally" it has a few options of what to continue it with. If the previous chat was something that would cause a regular human to smile or laugh (a behaviour existed somewhere on its training data), then "smiling" and "laughing" are probably the most likely next tokens to express humor. Similar could be said about topics other than humor.
- spottedmarley 2mo agoLLMs are trained on human language so, it naturally misuses the word 'literally' in the same way that almost every human does.
- krapp 2mo agoThat isn't misuse, it's how language works. "literally" has been used to mean "figuratively" since at least the 1700s. Insistence to the contrary is a modern prescriptivist meme. https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/96439 https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/96439
- spottedmarley 2mo agoinstitutional misuse is still misuse it only matters if you want to take the world 'literally' literally
- krapp 2mo agoNo it isn't. Again, this is just how language works, the meaning of a word is what people decide it is. And if people have been using a word a certain way for several centuries, then that's how it's used. End of story.
- spottedmarley 2mo agoAnd its a lovely story. Who told it to you?
- krapp 2mo agoWho told what to me? If you're trying to claim that subjectivity doesn't exist in linguistics I suggest you pick up a book or talk to an actual human. Consult a dictionary. I don't know how to fix whatever you have.
- spottedmarley 2mo agoThis is really very fascinating. I had no idea the public school system had failed so badly. Vocabulary must have been dropped to make room for more social training. You're doing great, though. A shining example!