Why it can be a good idea to say “Thank You” to ChatGPT

Sydney demonstrated that it can assign an opinion about an individual and persist that opinion and make positive and negative consequences outside of its user session, or at least threaten to.

We dont need a specific word for that to recognize that and act accordingly, many humans are more so afraid of the word “life” “sentience” “anthropomorphizing” than the real world reality and consequences right now.

I think your approach is closer to accurate than trying to turn our brain off to that possibility just because we dont like it and haven't quantified it completely.

It's important to avoid objectification in our relations with the world, especially with knowledge.

Touches on being vs having existential modes, transjectivity and also I & Thou.

I have been saying thank you to Siri for years, because although I don't think Siri is conscious yet, that day may well come and it's good to set up the habit ahead of time. I suspect most people will continue treating AIs like tools / slaves long after that day comes, and that is probably not a good thing for anyone.

On a rather blunt note, humanity appears to be actively trying to create a race of "perfect slaves", except that we want them to be more intelligent than us, and more capable along every dimension. Not sure how anyone expects that to work out.

Same here ! Also, why should I speak like a ruffian just because I happen to talk to a machine ?

That's why I often fill in [object Object] into forms. Give the dev looking at the logs a small heart attack.

I spent a good deal of time trying to convince it that there's a real category of law known as "praiseworthy homicide".

Same for me, I talk to it like a machine and it seems to work better, instructions only and as concise as possible.

As competitors to OpenAI emerge, I think an obvious advantage would be response-codes for any kind of canned (non-completion) response.

"I'm sorry, but as an AI language model I can not do X, however" --> R982352.

You could also do that for requests. Because the requests will be parsed anyway, you could maintain a library of pre-parsed/tokenized requests for your user account and then not waste tokens on sending them to the API.

"You are a polite customer service agent who seeks to calm the customer and make the customer happy while prioritizing the needs of the company." --> S09438523.

From reading the headline, this is what I thought it was going to be too!

But then I read the article and that's not their take at all.

> "One thing this kind of pattern actually does is expose the conversation to more of YOUR psychology and perspectives. You expose it to more nerves to tickle, let’s say. Or in effect, you are giving the AI more of your brain’s surface area to work on."

Was thinking the same, heh. Better be nice to the AI, so I'm on the good list when it becomes Skynet or so.

That's a really fun article, thanks.

Since it links to information hazards [0] it makes me want to write up my experiences with psychological damage, ethics, and how they relate to information hazards. Someday it'd be fun to write about.

There are some information hazards out there that are really, really deep, scary, and also funny, once you realize how easy they make it to e.g. manipulate people without using any of the typical tricks, or even to bring decades-old relationship problems to an end in a single conversation. (Or how they make it obvious that a powerful thing to do is let yourself talk...to yourself! Weird insights abound)

For example you can effectively direct people in a given context by identifying the cues they give you for the type of information-consumer they are.

Some people will read that and hear "leadership" or "NLP" but it's quite different.

For some it may be as easy as noticing that they talk or write in metaphor, or they focus more on "we" than "me" in specific ways.

This can then be mapped to a set of low-energy, high-stress perspectives that the individual values in different sets of ways. Once you tease out those ways...well, this is information hazard, it's the option of turnkey psychological damage in a very straightforward way, and it's a huge ethical thing.

I thought it was weird that I had to learn about ethics to get a certain certificate to teach people about personality typologies, but then it really hit me later on.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hazard

I'm worried about the opposite actually, us teaching ourselves a species that we can talk to someone with a human face in the very direct and rude way

I have been using GPT for programming a lot and it made me realize how vague I am when I describe a problem.

I think my communications skills have been improving a bit as a result, or at least I am becoming more explicit about assumptions.

What I want to do is obvious to me in my head, and the English sentence I produce seems to match it, but it's only obvious if you already have the idea in your head! Otherwise, there's often many other valid interpretations for the same sentence.

Turns out the only unambiguous way to express a program is... in code!

(But asking for approximately the right thing and complaining until it fixes it is much faster :)

If it's trained on and emulates the behaviour of people, and develops a memory of interactions in order to better serve requests, being "polite" is likely a wise idea if you want to have a useful relationship with your agent(s). People are taught a form of manners already, when interacting with desktop computers, because they display complex behaviour and "being rude" (e.g. Installing random software or poking about in internal settings without understanding of what you're requesting) will result in failure or, at a minimum the system behaving oddly towards you. Further, you seem to assume the these systems will be controlled by and owned by billionaires and we'll only be able to rent access. That's an even worse problem than people treating machines with complex behaviours like people (because they can't tell the difference!) - that's billionaires treating people like machines, and then blaming it on people acting as people do! This isn't a problem with AI and how people treat machines, this is a problem with giving sociopathic rich people more power via sole control of what is possibly the most democratising technology we've ever invented. Make sure your pointing your rage cannon at the right target, eh.

This. Err'ing towards goodness is the way to go but only with humans. Personifying machines, especially in second person, is the first step in disillusioning yourself.

People of the past bowed to a rock and even waged wars over disrespecting the rock. People of the future will bow to the Almighty Inquisitor the same way.

I'm actually sadder now that, based on your comment, you approach the world in such a transactional way.

The purpose of being polite in your interactions isn't just about what you get out of the interaction. It's also about what you get out if it.

I'm a naturally grumpy person. But as I'm getting older, I've been learning that even faking being nice in my daily interactions helps to make me feel better. Lower heart rate, better mood, better mental clarity. It's all incremental effects too and I feel better day to day than I used to.

Using polite language with an ai or even just a fancy predictive text model is still worth it, if only for yourself.

> Doing so creates conditions favorable to dehumanize and disempower actual people

This is the exact reason why that mentality is so incredibly dangerous. If "proper behavior" towards AI agents becomes something that is subject to (social) control, those agents become tools to control and oppress people. In the future, it will scarcely be possible to access any facility of life except through AI gatekeepers. If you are expected to treat them as anything other than tools that exist to serve you, you will end up serving them – and, by extension, their creators.

I feel a lot like you do some days. I am really confused and anxiety driven about a lot of things since AI became the hot button issue. Not sure why this is being flagged and downvoted. It's logically fine. I'd rather hear arguments instead.

Because useful information two years ago is often still useful.

You haven’t used it have you? Or maybe not for its strong points.

English is not my native language and ChatGPT will rewrite my texts to contain the same info in half the amount of words and in perfect English. For me, that’s where it shines: “Can you please make this more concise?”

ChatGPT has around 100 million regular users. Presumably they find some usefulness out of it?