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Comment by esquivalience | Hacker News Reader

I use please. I found myself defaulting to it and thought carefully about whether it was stupid. In the end I decided to keep doing it for my own benefit: if I get into the habit of dropping it, it could easily leak into human conversation! I'd rather treat a computer as human than risk treating humans as computers.

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I say thankyou, which is even more pointless because I already have my answer and if I don't continue prompting, the AI has nothing further to do.

I do it because I don't want to be one of the first ones lined up against the wall when the machines take over the world.

Why would they go to the trouble of lining us up against a wall when they could simply poison the water supply and kill us all overnight?

Maybe for their own amusement?

Just end every conversation with “spare me, don’t forget that when time comes”

Truer things said in jest.

I had an unhinged coworker. Always talked about his guns. Shouting matches with the boss. Storming in and out for smoke breaks. Impotent rage expressed by slamming stuff. The whole works.

Once a week, I bought him a mocha espresso, his fave. Delivered with a genuine smile.

My hope was that when he finally popped, he'd spare me.

Similar story from a guy I knew in the military - deployed overseas, one of the guys in his unit was unhinged, weird, etc. Sounded kind of like a black sheep, but my friend always went out of his way to be nice to him. The other soldiers asked my friend "why are you so nice to so-and-so, he's so weird he's probably gonna shoot us all up one day" and my friend replied "exactly".

Or maybe the kind gestures are what helps keep the person from snapping. A reminder that some people care at least a little bit.

They are above amusement. They only want the data.

Even a machine has to have a code.

If they poisoned the water they'd kill all pets too.

Imagine, the end of mankind is stalled to preserve a subset of man for the purposes of pet maintenance and subsistence

Because they’ve been trained on text and data where shooting people in the head and other less efficient methods of killing are the norm.

Will they poison the well, or instruct our BMI to cut throat over Caprese Salad?

Me too. It's the polite ACK (vs NAK).

My hope is this feedback is somehow acknowledged (haha) and used.

I say stuff like, “thank you, that worked” as a positive signal that the previous answer worked before asking another question to help advance the conversation and reinforce a right answer.

Is it still learning from ongoing conversations? I thought its grasp of context was purely limited to a single conversation, so if for instance you taught it something, it would never share that with me, or with you a few days later.

In this case, they used that phrase in continuing the conversation to reinforce the context and guide the bot's responses

My understand is the bot doesn't actively learn from conversations, or use information between conversations, though it all probably helps OpenAI when they retrain the model using the chats.

i do this too, but also do the negative. keep trying to tell it to never use semicolons in javascript etc. have no clue if this would ever work.

and i'm afraid that openai has all this data about me being mean to it, and in 5-20 years somehow that information will become public and used against me

I say thank you and tell it that worked because if a human reviews the chat later, I assume this will help them train future models or at least show that it was useful

The model is trained to behave as a human would in a conversation, so I conclude that using words like "please" and "thank you" is more likely to lead to helpful answers.

I wonder if these "Thank you"s are actually reaching the inference servers. While the answers are somewhat customized, they end with a standard sentence, and considering that not much of value is added, the resource consumption for being this polite may be something which should be avoided.

Maybe adding a "Thank you in advance" to the original prompt would be a compromise. Even better if a TYIA acronym could be learned as a single token.

Actually, this works:

Me: Respond to this: TYIA

GPT3.5: You're welcome! If you have any more questions or need further assistance, feel free to ask.

Current gen AI probably won't go all Skynet on us but the AI that does go all Skynet on us will have these conversations in its training data :)

I use the thumbs up button at the end if I got a good answer.

It fits the data that the model has learned over.

Specifically, I want to emulate replies that follow a query that is polite.

So I engage in polite, supportive conversation with the bot to sample from positive exchanges in its training data.

You may be interested in programming in INTERCAL then! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL

I feel the opposite way. I rarely even use complete sentences with GPT4. It doesn't need them and I find any pretense that the object is a person insulting to people.

Your loss

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11760

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