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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

In life I tend to encounter two common patterns of intelligent people: those who had a good education and those who did not. I worry that when AGI comes it is going to be able to do all the things the smooth fast taking wily folks can do, and none of the things the educated folks can do, and we’ll accelerate not a slide into the singularity but a slide into inane banality.

How do you provoke a model into being wacky, challenging, and innovative?

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I told it to be unfriendly and use black humour. It certainly is wacky, especially with that TTS voice. Running this locally made me realize that OpenAI's ChatGPT is way too uptight and the personality is way too bland. The LLM can already whip out "smooth talk" faster than me.

    > we’ll accelerate not a slide into the singularity but a slide into inane banality

Half joking response: Have you looked at all the SEO garbage than any Google search produces these days? We are already in the great age of "inane banality".

> How do you provoke a model into being wacky, challenging, and innovative?

Are those the typical qualities of the educated…?

I can’t put my finger on it, but I think the intellectually challenging part is at the heart of the matter. A wily person can talk their way through a debate by saying things that sound compelling. An educated person has more ability to reason: they can challenge you when they know they are right, and explain why you are wrong.

It’s the difference between bluffing and sincerity, or dishonesty and truthfulness. Current LLMs are confident liars.

*…are often confidently incorrect

At the very least, it knows solved problems and repeat the solution. That's better than pretty much all humans, since humans can't know all known solutions.

This is exactly what's happening.

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