LaMDA: Google's New Conversation Technology

I think it's a common weakness of chatbots that you can get them to contradict themselves through presenting new evidence or assertions, or even just through how you frame a question. I found LaMDA to be much more resistant to this than I anticipated, when I tried it out (I'm a Googler).

It wasn't completely immune -- I was eventually able to get it to say that, indeed, Protoss is OP -- but it took a long time.

I'm joking, I know that if it did say controversial things the headline would be "Google has created a robot fascist". You can't win at the moment....

Despite changes in culture, people's nature hasn't changed in 200 years.

google: did you mean lambda?

This so much!

One thing about the UX of all conversational products, in stark contrast with real conversations, is that it forces you into a dynamic of "one question, one answer", "one message, one reply". I can imagine it could be pretty hard to break this paradigm, but for me it's like the equivalent of the uncanny valley in this context. No matter how good the replies are, if I'm forced into this dynamic, I just know that I'm talking to a robot.

In short, I don't think it's a California unique characteristic.

Sure, you will find people that are a bit more self absorbed and would just pong about themselves.

But there are so many conversational constraints- asking “why” is aggressive, direct feedback is discouraged, slipping pronouns or other identity traits is a minefield, etc. You should not follow up when others say something because they were being polite and you’re putting them in evidence…

If you get to engaged in a conversation people can feel weirded out, like you’re supposed to go through the motions but that’s it.

Not talking also can get you in trouble.

Talking about yourself is probably the safest thing to do.

Mountains out of molehills here.

One element of this I think is that California is highly individualistic. The people there ARE self-absorbed. It is a celebrated cultural value. It's the exact mirror of Tall Poppy Syndrome. No one cuts you down for talking about your own interests and uniqueness instead of collectivist and egalitarian topics like sports or the weather.

There's also a less intricate social code that comes from mixing together many people from different cultures. In a high-context, temporarily stable society, things get stratified and the litte social lubricants, expectations, and niceties get written into the socal contract and within the structure of the language itself (formal vs. informal forms). In a low-context and dynamic society, you are basically free to communicate without referencing the rulebook on what you should be saying or how you should be saying it and you bring less expectation that the other party will respond in some particularly scripted way.

What do people talk about where you're originally from?

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You could even ask to hear them play when you see them next.

Also, no response is also a response, you could just listen to them. No one's going to say "I just started taking guitar lessons" and remain silent for the rest of the evening; for sure they have much more to say about it.

However, to answer your question about how to appear less "self-involved", perhaps there's a structural trick you can use, which is to shift some of your writing from first-person to second-person and speak from the outside? How does this sound to you:

"It can take a while to learn that this can come across as self-absorbed and obnoxious in the US when speaking that way, so I've learned to consciously remember to ask questions about the person or the topic they presented, and void introducing related topics. This does make it more challenging to know when it's OK or how to actually switch topics (since, like the article mentions, conversations do flow from one topic to another) and this uncertainty can be anxiety-inducing"

I'm not saying it's essential, but as an exercise if you imaging talking about the situation that way, it can influence the tone.

I will repeat that I think your fear about sounding self-absorbed does not come out, to me, in your paragraph. I have worked with colleagues whose conversations do wander off on their own tangents if they're not asked to focus, and that may be similar to what you're talking about? But I can't be sure. If so, that is the difference between conversation for its own sake where sharing and opinion and life experiences are related, and workplace conversations which often have an objective, etc.

I think it makes the conversation more personal. Anyone can say, "Oh cool! What songs have you learned?" Only _you_ (you know, the friend they chose to talk to) can say, "Oh, that's cool! My grandpa gave me a cool guitar that I've been meaning to learn to play."

I find the best approach is to sandwich a personal anecdote between two "you" statements for the people who need a prompt to carry the conversation. For example, "That's really interesting. I've also been thinking about learning guitar. How are you liking your lessons?"

Maybe I'm wrong and people secretly think I'm obnoxious, but I think it's a good thing to quickly mention something like "my mom Y" to show your familiarity with a topic, so the other person knows how much detail they need to give when talking about it. Like, if they're explaining what a certain company does in detail, and your mom works there, you should probably let them know before they explain a ton of stuff you already know.

I think the key is just to steer the conversation back quickly. If you derail it talking about yourself, steer it back with something like "So how did you like X?"

James: I’m thinking about buying a new car. Rob: Oh yeah? I’m thinking about buying a new car too. James: Really? Rob: Yup, I just test drove a Mustang yesterday and it was awesome.

I think if you actually go back to the original topic straight after, it isn't going to bother people much but if you keep talking about your thing and not showing deep understanding of theirs, it can feel like you only heard some keywords and didn't even bother to listen to what they were actually saying.

If they wanted to be nefarious in this way, they could just mine your chats and emails and get a great idea about your state of mind. They wouldn't even have to get around potentially legally privileged information.

My go-to related example of this: People often worry that Facebook is listening to their conversations because they'll see an ad related to a conversation soon after. You probably shouldn't worry that they might be listening to you (because they're not), but you might want to worry that they didn't need to listen to you to know what ad to serve you.

Learned about it in the documentary Century of the Self, an outstanding work.

These limits can and will be blown away by bots given the amount of data they can crunch. Only issue is unlike in games like Chess or Go where the end state is clearly defined, with therapy its open ended and unknown what type of end states are possible.

Just a matter of time before all paths get mapped out.

It was too much emotional work to work with the training data so I haven't worked on it in a long time, but if something like that would be helpful, feel free to message me as well. :)

Or, if there's some community somewhere where people trying to solve this common problem gather, I'd love to hear about it / join!

(GPT?) auto generated replies for karma building seem to be gaining traction, I wonder if it can spell the death of forums haha (most likely, it will bring in better moderation systems).