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Comment by hengheng | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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’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.

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"!

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