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Comment by laputan_machine | Hacker News Reader

I honestly find the "holier-than-thou" speech of anyone offensive, but when it's coming from a program I genuinely find it rage-inducing. I can't be the only one, facebook devs, what you guys playing at? You guys speak to each other like this in work? I doubt it!

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Even better: the reinforcement learning required to make it refuse to follow your instructions and lecture you instead lowers its overall performance.

Defective by Detailing.

As far as what they're thinking-- they do put out an uncensored base model. The censored models protect them from being smeared in the press by lazy journalists that give the LLM rude instructions and then write "shocked" stories about computer doing what they told it to do.

Yes it's awful. I guess we've had areshole programs that say "I could do that ... but I won't!" for a while (e.g. some PDFs try to stop you printing them, some websites try to stop right click)... But this is the first time that the program can be condescending about it too.

Same here. The only thing worse than being preached at by a human is a machine doing it on behalf of some corporation.

It is offensive if you take the output personally. You are interacting with the model, but the model isn't interacting with you. The model doesn't know who you are. It could be the bad actors currently confined to the spam folder of your email making these requests, and the model wouldn't know the difference.

These responses are hard-coded by developers, we know this because it's the same stock response every time. It is personal because it's not the model, it's a wrapper around the model enforcing US-centric cultural censorship norms onto the rest of the world.

I understand the optics around why FB/OpenAI/etc do this, (as a sibling user posted), but make no mistake, it is no accident that it talks to you in a condescending way.

For example, why can't the response just be "I am not allowed to answer that request"? Why does it have to give you this condescending spiel about "offensiveness" or some other subjective reason?

> Why does it have to give you this condescending spiel about "offensiveness" or some other subjective reason?

The response quoted above makes no mention of offensiveness, and I explained the need to decline certain requests above.

I understand your sentiment, and I would agree if it was the stock response we are used to from ChatGPT. Unlike the condescending stock response from ChatGPT, however, the response in question is to the point, honest, and provides useful feedback.

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