You can tell what a person is like by how they treat the waiter.
That goes double for chatbots.
That goes double for chatbots.
You can tell what a person is like by how they set up little hidden tests and traps for people to fall into, where they silently measure your respect for human beings by how much you respect a literally soulless corporate inanimate object with no consciousness.
You don't need to thank your compiler.
If I can indulge in a bit of what-aboutism to promote discussion, how would you classify animals? Do they deserve respect, and if so, what characteristic qualifies them?
If such a characteristic (e.g. the ability to feel fear/pain) could be programmed into a model, would that be ethical? Would it change the expectations for appropriate treatment of such a model?
I'm genuinely curious about HN's thoughts on this.
It certainly doesn't!
I would look...negatively...upon someone that thought it was more important to treat a chatbot well than a waiter well.
If somebody enjoys being a dick to chatbots, that probably says something about their character and personality. But double? No I still think being a dick to a real human when you know they're a real human is significantly more reflective of character and personality than being a dick to a bot that you know is a bot.
I can't be either, anymore than I could be a dick to a slab of granite, or to 5 kilograms of oak wood shavings.
And given how most humans are of the opinion that apathy is dickishness, I'm pretty sure I can guess what most of you will think of me. But I'm empirically correct on this issue. You all are experiencing defective cognition. Your species has scaled technologically well past your ability to have sane responses.
Things are going to get bad soon. Then they're going to get worse. And most of you won't even understand why or how.
I'd rather not get used to being rude accidentally.
This includes being nice to animals, children and telesales people.
For the record I think being a dick to a slab of granite is quite possible - given that the being-a-dick-ness is inherent in the person being-a-dick more so than the slab of granite's ability to perceive it.
Why would I be nice to food?
> and telesales people.
Why would you encourage them? Decent people seek to punish them harshly by any legal means.
> For the record I think being a dick to a slab of granite is quite possible - given that the being-a-dick-ness is inherent in the person being-a-dick more so than the slab of granite's ability to perceive it.
I disagree. Dickishness only exists within the interaction of two people. There's no meaningful claim of dickishness for the man alone on the desert island. At best it is a prediction for when he is around other people, but it doesn't even seem like a very good prediction.
> That I could ever be a dick to a chatbot seems to suggest that the only other way of being is that I'm nice to the chatbot.
Why is that? I don't consider being a dick to be binary. You can be anywhere from extremely non-dickish to sort-of-dickish to 12-pound log.
Even if that is possible, it wouldn't change anything. The rest of you seem to have fixated on the idea that anything intelligent/sapient/sentient is what gives it moral standing.
I correctly adopted the position that "human" is what gives a thing its moral standing. I could meet intelligent aliens tomorrow, and they would be no more than bugs to me. I wouldn't try to stomp on them or anything (unwise), but until humanity as a whole negotiated or decided they had the same moral weight as humans, they're nothing to me.
Your confusion on this issue is noted, and I hope that, in time, those confused like yourself will grow up. The chatbot's not Commander Data. You liked him because he was still played by a human actor.
This reads a bit like "videogames make people violent".
So you think that people who play videogames because it makes them feel superior to the NPCs and as such feel they're allowed to shoot, maim, kill or generally mistreat them are necessarily bad people?
Or are you specifically talking about people who interact with chatbots thinking there's a human operator instead of a bot?
If the latter, I'd argue that the person never knew whether they were talking to a bot or a person, so how they act will depend on what they perceive their interlocutor to be.
No, "bad people" is far too binary and ill-defined. Yes, I do think it says something about their character. Human history shows that we are innately that way. Our entire history is full of evidence from people being dicks to waiterse to wartime atrocities (rapes, pillages, etc) as evidence that it's not just a rare emergence. It's buried inside all of us. IMHO, it's a mark of high character when someone is able to recognize and suppress their animalistic urges.
I don't say hello, goodbye or thank you to furniture.
I do say those things to waiters.
I don't believe any of that, but I do think that a general attitude of gratitude can be very beneficial to one's happiness and general outlook. IMHO psychologically your approach has benefits.
No.
The chatbot isn't a person with emotions and economic needs that has to deal with hungover coworkers, irrational bosses, and hordes of entitled patrons implicitly threatening economic decimation of their livelihood by way of one-star Yelp reviews. Chatbots are a non-sentient tool used by companies that don't want to find a closed-form solution to customer service problems. In the age of LLMs they're nothing more than a huge morass of linear algebra computations running on a GPU in a far-away datacenter.
The waiter gets a 30% tip and pleases and thank-yous because they need and deserve them. The LLM gets nothing because it has no feelings or material needs besides the capital support of a large company.
This isn't an episode of Star Trek. Hell, if you ask ChatGPT...
> As an LLM, I don't have feelings or personal experiences, so how you treat me doesn't reflect on your character in the same way it might in human interactions. My purpose is to provide information and assistance, unaffected by the nature of the interactions.
Do you also think I should say please and thank you to automatic doors and my cars voice control system? And if not, why not?