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Comment by zogrodea | Hacker News Reader

That sounds like a surprisingly fortunate mistake, because you would hope recommending others to go to a food bank will encourage (and actually make some of) them to give something to the needy there.

The suggestion the AI makes to consider going into it on an empty stomach could help the tourist to empathise with others who are less fortunate, because those are people who feel hungry every day. (Although the suggestion does sound unfortunate on first impression.)

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You're reading too much into it, and seeing empathy from a language model where there's none.

I don't see where in his comment he implied that the model has empathy.

The model proposed to do something to empathize with X, but that doesn't imply that he commenter is seeing empathy from the model.

> seeing empathy from a language model

I think you misread the message above

Aplogies for the lack of clarity on my part. The other two sibling comments are right about what I meant.

I don't think a language model has empathy, but I think this suggestion can be good for the potential real-world consequences it may have and, if its suggestions are acted on, that might inspire empathy from the actors.

I think you're right that my interpretation/hope about the consequences are unlikely though.

Empathy as a cultural artefact is imbedded in large learning models insofar as one might find it expressed in their training set as human language.

It follows then that LLMs do in fact -express- empathy (as prose) even though they of course do not experience empathy as an emotion or as a call to action.

It’s important to remember that although LLMs do not have an emotional existence, they are portals through which we access a significant corpus of human knowledge, language, and culture. It follows that they will be capable and even adept at expressing elements of that knowledge, language, and culture - including parts we think of as emotionally driven.

> will encourage (and actually make some of) them to give something to the needy there.

or just drop by to get some food. "unmissable" :)

I don't understand what food banks are for.

Does Canada have something like Food Stamps/WIC?

Food is absurdly cheap, and not all food needs to be cooked/prepared.

They are places, commonly run by volunteers, where people with financial problems can get a food package at regular intervals, e.g. weekly. They sometimes rely on food donated by supermarkets with a 'best before' which has passed - which isn't a big deal for certain types of food such as rice and pasta.

>They sometimes rely on food donated by supermarkets with a 'best before' which has passed

Oh! That makes a bunch of sense. Good idea to have a food bank to get rid of aging food.

yep. I used to volunteer in one, we had a large warehouse and everything revolved around best before dates. We had quite a few people on our lists, often single mothers with kids. We'd make up packages for them each week. A big part of it (for me at least) was giving treats so the mothers would have something nice they could give for the poor kids :( not too much of course, majority by weight was staples like bread rice flour and pasta, and lots of vegetables. We'd also occasionally get very impractical donations (like one time we recieved almost a thousand banannas) and had to get creative cooking to preserve them to last longer. Lots of pickling, jams etc

I have never heard of a food bank in Ontario offering food with passed expiration dates. I previously volunteered there and most of the food was from grocery stores/corporate donors, but not expired.

Not in Ontario, but I helped sort canned goods for a charity a few times, and they were compelled by law to be much more strict with "best by" dates and dented cans than I would be at home. I assume that approach is pretty common across North America.

Actually in the US there is a law that protects charities from being sued for providing spoiled food. The Good Samaritain Food Donation Act.

That's not true. The law only applies to wholesale supply chain, not providing food to consumers.

https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/08/13/good-samaritan-ac...

The act also provides limited liability protection, both civil and criminal, for those who distribute food and groceries, such as food banks.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1791

The food bank I worked at had guidelines per item group. Different items had different levels of strictness, though any worker was free to throw away any item if they thought it was spoiled or too badly damaged. Dents were okay as long as it remained sealed.

My guess is the strictness of the rules is driven by availability of resources and the level of need being met by the organization.

Food does not have expiration dates. Food has "sell by" or "best by" dates.

Meat usually has "use by" (or "use or freeze by") which is an expiration date.

The exact situation depends on the province but nothing exactly like food stamps that I’m aware of. Most of the support is through direct payments.

It takes time to access any of those benefits though, and there are still some that despite access to those struggle for whatever reason.

Food banks are not an exclusively Canadian thing - a lot of people in the U.K. have ended up depending on them as well.

The average cost of rent for a bachelor/studio in Ontario's cheapest cities is about double the max allowance for all expenses on Ontario Works.

Food banks are all over the USA.

There are plenty of people who have absurdly little money, and food is far from free. With children, shelter, a doctor bill and an inefficient vehicle to get to work, your minimum-wage little money can go to zero fast.

Food inflation and shrinkflation in Canada has gone ballistic.

It’s not uncommon for something to cost 2-3x what it did 4 years ago, but the official figures on inflation are cooked to make it appear lower.

Food is not absurdly cheap in Canada, and has gone up an incredible amount in the last 2 years.

the suggestion is terrible, full stop. it would be akin to someone standing outside a movie theater yelling at people because they should be spending their time fighting world hunger.

sure, they might be right, but its kind of missing the point.

Perhaps the model achieved a level of intelligence where it can understand that humans are happiest when giving to those who need, and decided that tourists ought to engage in helping people wherever they go in order to really achieve what they're looking for when going on vacation, which is not actually taking selfies in famous tourist attractions for Instagram as they'd imagined, but to feel actual happiness.

Thank you for the “full stop.” That always makes an argument much more persuasive.

thanks for the ad hominem. did you have anything constructive to add?

I don't think that's a fair comparison. Someone yelling outside a theatre would be causing an active nuisance and provoking people.

What's the worst this unaggressively-worded and unintended (unintended by those who deployed this LLM) suggestion will do? I would think most people would think "that's a weird suggestion" and move on after a moment's thought, continuing to do what they did before.

It's easy to say someone yelling will significantly aggravate others. I don't think that's the case here.

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