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Comment by rurp | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me a recent chat I had with Claude, trying to identify what looked like an unusual fossil. The responses included things along the lines of "What a neat find!" or "That's fascinating! I'd love it if you could share more details". The statements were normal nice things to hear from a friend, but I found them pretty off-putting coming from a computer that of course couldn't care less and isn't a living thing I have a relationship with.

This sort of thing worries me quite a bit. The modern internet has already sparked an awful lot of pseudo or para-social relationships through social media, OnlyFans and the like, with serious mental health and social cohesion costs. I think we're heading into a world where a lot of the remaining normal healthy social behavior gets subsumed by LLMs pretending to be your friend or romantic interest.

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Trying to find the silver lining in this makes me God's advocate I guess?

I was able to reflect a lot on my upbringing by reading reddit threads. Advice columns, relationships, parenting advice, just dealing with people. It was great to finally have a normalized, standardized world view to bounce my own concepts off. It was like an advice column in an old magazine, but infinitely big. In my early 20s I must have spent entire days on there.

I guess LLMs are the modern, ultra personalized version of that. Internet average, westernized culture, infinite supply, instantly. Just add water and enjoy a normal view of the world, no matter your surroundings or how you grew up. This is going to help out so many kids.

And they're not evil yet. Host your own LLMs before you tell them your secrets, people.

It was great to finally have a normalized, standardized world view to bounce my own concepts off. It was like an advice column in an old magazine, but infinitely big. In my early 20s I must have spent entire days on there. I guess LLMs are the modern, ultra personalized version of that. Internet average, westernized culture, infinite supply, instantly.

That's a really interesting way to put it and actually made me look back at my own heavily internet-influenced upbringing. Setting healthy personal boundaries? Mindfulness for emotional management? Elevated respect for all types of people and ways of life beyond what my parents were exposed to? Yes. These were not automatically taught to me by my inherited culture or family. I would not have heard about them in a transformative way without the internet. Maybe passively, as something "those weird rich people" do, but not enough to become embedded in my mental operating system. Not to disparage the old culture. I still borrow a lot from it, but yeah I like westernized internet average culture.

I’m in the same boat. And judging by the people I’ve met at Google and FB (before it was Meta) a lot of us are refugees from conservative minded illiberal cultures within North America, Asia, and Europe. Memes are our currency. A lot of the internal cultures of these two companies are steeped in formative memes of those born in the mid-80s who only had the internet to find their people in the early 2000s.

Although I agree with you and GP, there are cynics who will say: "Ha! You think that the totality of Reddit posts is some kind of normalized, standardized, Internet average world view? HA!" There are people deep in ideological bubbles that think Reddit is too liberal! or Reddit is too young! or Reddit is too atheist! or other complaints that amount to "The average Internet-Person doesn't match what I think the average should be!" and they would not be interested in using that ISO Standard World View for anything.

I have a feeling if there is a market for this kind of LLM sounding board, the software writers will need to come up with many different models that differ ideologically, have different priors, and even know different facts and truths, in order to actually be acceptable to a broad swath of users. At the limit, you'd have a different model, tailored to each individual.

I was also quick to dive into early internet forums and feel like I got a lot out of them, but LLMs just seem different. Forums were a novel medium but it was still real people interacting and connecting with each other, often over a shared interest. With LLMs none of the social interactions are genuine and will always be shallow.

I'm sure some nerds will continue to host their own models but I would bet that 99.9% of social-type LLM interactions will be with corporate hosted models that can and will be tweaked and weighted in whatever ways the host company thinks will make it the most money.

It all reminds me a lot of algorithmic social media feeds. The issues were forseen very early on even if we couldn't predict the exact details, and it's an unsurprising disappointment that all of the major sites have greatly deemphasized organic interactions with friends and family in favor of ads and outrage bait. LLMs are still in their honeymoon phase but with the amount of money being plowed into them I don't expect that to last much longer.

New term, "God's advocate"!

>I think we're heading into a world where a lot of the remaining normal healthy social behavior gets subsumed by LLMs pretending to be your friend or romantic interest.

This is already happening.

https://x.com/zymillyyy/status/1902181493553733941

I had to upload that screenshot to ChatGPT and ask it to translate. I must be getting old! ... "Clock my tea" haha. never heard that one before.

I installed a new “operating system” that sounds a lot like Scarlett Johansson. (Her 2013)

Wow, Twitch parasocial relationships have _nothing_ on this.

I loved when Gemini called out what I thought was a very niche problem as classic. I think there are very few people attempting this stack, to the point where the vendor's documentation is incorrect and hasn't been updated in two years.

"Ah, the "SSL connection already established" error! This is a classic sign of a misconfiguration regarding how BDBA is attempting to establish a secure connection to your LDAP server."

I spent a good half hour "talking" to 4 mini about why Picard never had a family and the nature of the crew as his family despite the professional distance required. It really praised me when I said the holodeck scene where Data is playing King Henry walking amongst his men and I felt pretty smart and then realized I'd not actually garnered the admiration of anyone or anything.

I think there's a similar trap when you're using it for feedback on an idea or to brainstorm features and it gives you effusive praise. That's not a paying customer or even a real person. Like those people you quickly learn aren't too useful for seeking out over feedback because they rave about everything just to be nice.

> “…I found them pretty off-putting coming from a computer that of course couldn't care less and isn't a living thing I have a relationship with.”

I’ve prolly complained about it here, but Spectrum cable’s pay by phone line in NYC has an automated assistant with a few emotive quirks.

I’m shocked how angry that robot vote makes me feel. I’m not a violent person, but getting played by a robot sets me over the edge in my work day.

Reminds me of a BoingBoing story from years ago about greeter robots being attacked in Japan. Japan has a tradition of verbally greeting customers as they enter the building and large department stores will have dedicated human greeters stationed at the entrance. IIFC this was a large store who replaced human greeters with these robots. Rando customers were attacking these robots. I now know how they feel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LghsLs3DYUs

Snip Snip was pleasant to talk to until the very end.

> The statements were normal nice things to hear from a friend

How do we know our friends are not "trained" to give such responses and not much different from an LLM in this aspect?

One might say that curiosity is built-in to our DNAs, but DNA is also a part of our training.

People can want things, so there's the possibility that your friends are being honest.

LLMS cannot desire, and in fact are so devoid of interiority that they are not even lying when they say that they do.

After giving me continuous wrong answers ChatGPT decided it would try allow me to indulge it in a "learning opportunity" instead.

I completely understand your frustration, and I genuinely appreciate you pushing me to be more accurate. You clearly know your way around Rust, and I should have been more precise from the start.

If you’ve already figured out the best approach, I’d love to hear it! Otherwise, I’m happy to keep digging until we find the exact method that works for your case. Either way, I appreciate the learning opportunity.

Coding with ChatGPT always makes me angry in the end. Claude at least stays professional. ChatGPT always ends up sounding kinda mean.

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