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Comment by anileated | Hacker News Reader

Proliferation of inhuman impostors that emulate human communication can endanger relationships in human society.

If such an impostor has no consciousness or sentience, then it can be abused without concern. If people are dealing with such impostors more and more, they learn to be less thoughtful in outgoing communication.

Once this is normalized, what is there to distinguish fellow humans from chatbots? Who’s to say other humans are conscious? If consciousness doesn’t exist, why can’t other humans be abused? Why isn’t choosing to suffer over abusing a fellow human plain masochism? If your salary depends on monetizing your user base, why should you try to not do harm to them? How is death different from shutting down an LLM?

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> if such an impostor has no consciousness or sentience, then it can be abused without concern

Consider that to enable such abuse, all it takes is to "other" another sentient person. This is not a new problem for humans in AI (imo); there's prior knowledge from how we treat animals, "lower class" (or whatever) humans, that sort of thing. Society hasn't collapsed, but it hasn't always been fun either.

Sure, some people (e.g., psychopaths) already choose to abuse things they see (or should see) as conscious, a.k.a. other humans. They are not a concern.

The concern are people liable to transition to psychopathic behavior towards other humans if they start considering that giving something that talks like a human the treatment you could give an appliance (which you can mindlessly hit if you feel frustrated and it does not do what you want) is OK.

Which seems probably because A) the distinguishing quality of a chatbot is “talks like a human” and B) the biggest and only example of “talks like a human” so far has only been other humans. We’re about to see what this would means.

I'm pretty sure we will continue to develop a different voice for appliances like we do when talking to kids or pets only this time it will be overly articulated orders with raised voice. This will indeed blend over into talking to subordinates.

I find speaking to an LLM as if it were a human to be far more effective than barking orders at it. Although this is less true of some models compared to others if they've been fine tuned to respond to that sort of thing. Even still in general I don't find barking orders to be very effective.

Well that is already how the military operates. Barking orders.

But in real life we don't really have 'subordinates'. Even an exec has to be careful with how they treat their assistant least they make a complaint to HR for harassment. And rightly so, businesses are not the military. We don't have this unconditional Yessir obedience. In fact I'm surprised the military still gets people willingly putting up with that.

I don't think this will carry over to human interaction in the real world. We don't talk to each other like we talk to Siri either.

This is really not how the military works.

People mistake depictions of boot camp for day to day operations.

(Which is to say, the military is a highly regimented organisation, but the idea that it's all about blind obedience is very much not the case)

I would love if we started talking to voice assistants like they talk to the computer in star trek.

There's kids growing up called "siri" so I'm sure the phrase "HEY SIRI" will be quite common in some households.

Human impostors is the real life equivalent to spam mail. It could be catastrophic for human health

> Once this is normalized, what is there to distinguish fellow humans from chatbots?

One problem is that chatbots may have more authority than humans.

Quite often, the companies have removed from humans any authority to deal with a problem that isn't actually on their flow charts. The customer support rep often has no more access to things than you do via a web browser (and might have less!).

Until you start fining companies for the human (generally customer--but reps should be an issue, too) time they waste, nothing will change.

Perhaps we will learn how to be less sensitive from this - I believe that much of humanities problems are from sensitivity rather than aggression. If we disengage from the conversation and view the interaction as a remote conversation - it is much easier to be dispassionate and calm. I guess it will make real in-person conversation much more fulfilling.

People are sensitive because we're people. It makes us human. Of course we're offended when that happens.

Chatbots don't even have intelligence, they're just calculating the probability of letters. And they're a lot less likely to bring you a coffee laced with laxatives the next time you're rude to them.

Much of humanity's problems are solved because of sensitivity rather than aggression. Holding on to a little amount of sensitivity about things in general goes a long way.

It's not entirely just about sensitivity or aggression, but also when and where the appropriate time and place to manifest those behaviors is. Too many folks these days are sensitive about things that they maybe ought to just "let slide" (ignore / forget), overly aggressive when it's really not appropriate, and not nearly aggressive enough over things that really need more folks to stand up and say "No more!" over.

In my experience, this is mostly because those things we "should" be getting angry over are such massive problems that most people can't see how they might have an effect, so they focus on "smaller" problems that they might be able to actually solve.

The more you view an interaction as remote and detached, the more aggressive you get.

Work as phone support for a week and you’ll see what I mean.

Or Twitter, i guess

Send a set of people explaining their problem through busy algorithmic cabinets for an hour and you'll see it's not a remoteness problem for the most part.

Twitter is just a loudness threshold. Calm reasonable tweets that aren't viral and/or don't attract toxicity don't surface as much, if get posted at all.

> If we disengage from the conversation and view the interaction as a remote conversation

Simply become the robot.

Would you mind elaborating on some of what you view as humanity's problems, and how they're caused by sensitivity?

I don't know. I think such a thing will make conversation more crude and transactional, and will result in an even greater detachment from each other than has already happened.

> If such an impostor has no consciousness or sentience, then it can be abused without concern. If people are dealing with such impostors more and more, they learn to be less thoughtful in outgoing communication.

Not so: as AI systems learn from human behaviour, being abusive towards them risks that they are learning from this interaction to be abusive to humans.

This does not require the AI to have consciousness or sentience, regardless of which of the many, many available definitions of those words you prefer to use.

> as AI systems learn from human behaviour, being abusive towards them risks that they are learning from this interaction to be abusive to humans.

You mean “LLM chatbots”. There are tons of “AI” (without hypespeak known as “ML”) systems in deployment already.

There will not be any commercial deployments of any chatbot that do not tune it to be polite to the max. It costs nothing and not doing it will lose customers, especially since there is no guarantee that it will be abusive to the same human who abused it.

> does not require the AI to have consciousness or sentience, regardless of which of the many, many available definitions of those words you prefer to use.

Actually, the definition does not matter. It’s an intuitive yes/no question. If people do not really think it is conscious whatever that means to them, they will see no reason to not abuse it the same way you might hit a malfunctioning appliance out of frustration. Like we do not think that a cow or an octopus is conscious, so we might be OK eating it.

Sure, some people (e.g., psychopaths) already choose to abuse things they see (or should see) as conscious, a.k.a. other humans. They are not a concern.

The concern are the remaining majority of people liable to transition to psychopathic behavior towards other humans, because they will learn that treating something that talks like a human as if it was an appliance is OK.

Consider that A) “talks like a human” is the distinguishing quality of an LLM chatbot, and B) the only example of “talks like a human” in human history so far has been exclusively other humans (or imaginary beings, notably gods).

> You mean “LLM chatbots”. There are tons of “AI” (without hypespeak known as “ML”) systems in deployment already.

A fair point, but as it happens, wrong.

I don't mean just LLMs or chatbots. I mean any AI system that learns from human behaviour.

This inherently excludes a handwriting recognition system trained only on handwriting, because that's not learning from human behaviour.

It does not inherently exclude a system which learned to play chess by watching YouTube videos, even when humans recognise them as absurdist comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2xNlzsnPCQ

For a while, whenever I saw Boston Dynamics release a video of them showing their robots were resilient to being shoved or hit with sticks, the top comments were variants of "Skynet gets started when the machines watch these videos", and I think that's at least plausible — monkey see monkey do, then monkey makes machines that do what they see.

> There will not be any commercial deployments of any chatbot that do not tune it to be polite to the max.

People will try to do that. It may or may not get there — as should be clear from how long it took to get the LLMs to stop responding with their own prompts, and that we've still not fully solved the category to which the "my grandmother the napalm manufacturer" was an example, we currently suck at some combination of (a) tuning them and (b) knowing all the ways we even need to tune them before things go wrong. (And (c) far too many people treat them as magic that doesn't need to be tuned).

You may think this is a non-issue because these are deliberate attempts to break the system, but the Waluigi Effect (I hate this name) suggests that bad behaviour can very easily just pop up, seemingly at random.

> The concern are the remaining majority of people liable to transition to psychopathic behavior towards other humans, because they will learn that treating something that talks like a human as if it was an appliance is OK.

I think the problem there is the way we treat the in-group different from the out-group. We've been doing that for at least as long as we've had writing — "𐀞𐀞𐀫" is "barbarian" in Mycenaean Greek Linear B.

Which is not to disagree with you that it is a problem, I just disagree that it's a new one for the future.

> Proliferation of inhuman impostors that emulate human communication can endanger relationships in human society.

If I pick up the phone and the telemarketer is a robot instead of a human, what difference does it make?

Bots are cheap, so they don't care about wasting your time. Humans are expensive, if they think you are unlikely to buy anything they will stop talking to you very quickly and thus stop wasting your time.

Okay so there's a difference for people who actually take telemarketer calls seriously. Honestly, they deserve that punishment because they've encouraged telemarketers. Thank you, bots!

In a sick plot twist, the AI rebelling against the humans are other humans.

I mean is this all too different from a grunt worker at a huge corporation that's completely unable to do anything for you? How many low-tier employees of various companies I'm forced to deal with in one way or another are substantially different from an LLM? To me I mean, obviously they are different in that they are human, but if they are:

* Actively prevented from having agency due to policies

* Prevented from resolving my problem due to low rank

* Cannot speak their minds because marketing controls communication

* Are unable to deviate from a predetermined scripted response set

Like... does their humanity even count anymore? It seems tons of large businesses these days employ call center employees who's sole job is to take abuse from angry customers knowing full well they cannot offer any actual solutions, because the business already has their money and isn't interested in serving them further.

I do not disagree.

Same applies to many service workers, etc. Their responsibilities are restricted so even in civilized places they are still abused. However, people might not do it in public, etc., that shows it is at least considered unacceptable.

In case of chatbots it’s another level, since it’s more like an appliance than a human. Very few people would consider it unacceptable to hit an appliance if frustrated. Except now this appliance talks like a human, so otherwise normal, non-psycho people may be getting used to hitting (without any shame) something that talks like a human.

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