Oh fuck! How do people feel about robots that leverage profanity? | Hacker News Reader

Oh fuck! How do people feel about robots that leverage profanity?

arxiv.org

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“But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it. I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering, though models are easy to find. Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix F, Part II, On Translation

Tails are what get you though.

I'd probably smash a robot that swore at me or my family.

"Tell your c---t daughter to get off the street"

Will probably result in me looking for a heavy stone.

Swear words are literally fighting words whilst a robot cannot, legally, be assaulted. I'll take destruction of property to defend my daughter's honor to a jury of normies.

I'd prefer swearing over a robot who says "Per my last email, ..."

But let's be honest: The thing we're both afraid of is a robot who can get impatient and emotional.

They've already programmed impatience to the chat bots in federal government offices. Get testy and they'll hang up on you. However, they can't get emotional, they lack soul.

They can't get impatient either. Only some vague semblance of what impatience means to a programmer or two.

I think you missed the GP's joke there.

Oh yeah, boo federal government bots because boo federal government. Hilarious.

You don't want me on that jury. But if you pick up a heavy civil suit instead of a stone, you do.

Civil suit for what?

It needs to get to a jury and for that the prosecutor needs to think he'll win.

I doubt most prosecutors will stake their conviction ratio for a very sympathetic defendant.

(Except in San Fran and DC. There ill take whatever deal Im offered)

You don't need a prosecutor's cooperation to file a civil lawsuit in the US.

In the described scenario I'd be happy to find in your favor for intentional infliction of emotional distress, with negligence and vicarious liability and extra zeros.

interesting paper / idea. i like the idea of a robot or ai who uses profanity like a regular person (if thats ur thing, guess it depends on ur context). i know people who instruct their ai assistants to be rude, mean or profane because they listen better to that. like asking it to tell you to RTFM if you ask a question thats trivially answered (compared to some further context you specify , or not).

i suppose everyone learns to listen better to certain personas through their lifes experiences, so its good to be able to tune it towards personal preferences and not but overly protective or conservative limits or restrictions. (obviously thats a snake pit so i do totally understand tight restrictions)

The default obsequious, yuppie buddy chatbot personas of today make me hate them. Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker's Guide perfectly captured the infuriating annoyance of machines programmed to act like overly polite friends when he had the automatic doors always tell you how delighted they were to open for you.

It's a machine, dammit. One of its (potential) advantages vs hiring a human is not having extraneous transactional exchanges. If my personal AI assistant had to have a persona, I'd rather it sound and talk like Joe Pesci from Goodfellas.

I'm tinkering with the 'indifferent god' persona and it's been very refreshing.

If you think of LLMs as machines, you will be surprised a lot more than if you think of them as humans, so the latter is the better abstraction.

> you will be surprised a lot more than if you think of them as humans, so the latter is the better abstraction.

I'm not following what you mean here. In what ways do you think I'd be surprised?

In that they can't do math, they don't follow instructions well, they aren't accurate, which are all things that are surprising for machines but very non-surprising for humans.

Oh, I see. I'm already well aware of the many substantial limitations of LLMs and the counter-intuitive nature of these gaps. My comment was pre-assuming a scenario where the chat AI could usefully and correctly answer the question and, even in that case, I want the chat AI to just answer the question and not pretend to have a human-like personality.

Yes, but my point is that that's the wrong way to think about it. They don't have a human-like personality that was tacked on, they _are_ more human than machine.

the actual title seems to be unacceptable, however the obvious profanity version is.

[pseudo]actual title :

"Oh F**k! How Do People Feel about Robots that Leverage Profanity?"

even this breaks, very interesting

HN fucks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39392726

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44122636

So does Jared Dunn from Silicon Valley.

Good; censoring profanity (especially self-censoring) is for cowards. Be brave and dish out your fucks liberally in your papers!

Robots today can't "leverage profanity". Robots today can generate words either excluding profanity via some pre-made dictionary or not excluding them. Since both results are simply rehash of the human created data, of course it is possible to program robots to copy profanity too.

It really says nothing about the robot, because it is a robot; but a characteristic of a human who programmed it.

Swearing is very location dependent, as a Brit, and a northern one at that, peppering a few swear words in may not be that unusual. This can, erm how shall we put it, 'surprise' some others.

Grok's unhinged mode is the closest I have seen a bot that leverages profanity. I find it quite entertaining to use occasionally like watching a South Park episode.

My first question would be: Why? As in: Why do we even need or want to program robots to use profanity?

Because the cutest little fluf ball who just squeeked she loves me then wobbles back and forth back to her charging station blurting out an oh fuck as she stubs her toe is hilarious and i deserve to have that in my life

Profanity should not be in the title of scientific articles. Most unprofessional. In addition, titling your article for shock value should be discouraged. The end point will be a degraded discourse.

Professionalism is not a virtue; measured irreverence is---an uncensored "Fuck" in this scenario falls into that category.

Silliness has an important and necessary place in research.

NOT in professional communication. If you want to run your lab that way, feel free.

We tell children to don't use profanity because they have a hard time regulating themselves. Telling adults to do the same is misplaced authoritarian behavior, the kind that may come from people who failed to mature and still obey (and repeat) what they were told as a child but now sound obsequious.

Profanity largely exists to be offensive, and loses power when ubiquitous. It especially loses power when five year olds say it for every little mood swing they have. Nobody wants to hear offensive words from a child because it makes adults realize how childish they sound.

I've joined jobs and the first thing people said to me is "ah, you must be the new cunt!"

Different people have different standards for this type of thing. Be a good cunt and accept that there are over 8 billion people on the world, some of whom have very different norms than you have. Don't declare your own standards as somehow authoritative.

We have certain professional communications standards in the scientific community. This isn't a corner bar.

No, you have certain ways you like communication to happen. That's okay, everyone had that. To present this as some sort of objective standard is complete bollocks, as is your claim that it somehow "degrades" discourse.

This applies twentyfold when the topic of the scientific paper is swearing. Like mate, seriously?

Anyway, I tried. Good luck with your life.

I tend to agree. A lot of medical and scientific writing often falls on deaf ears because most people only respond to a conversational tone. That's why you write corporate emails in a conversational tone, it's just what's most effective.

I think, if the subject matters call for it, which clearly this does as they're literally looking at swearing, then it can be fine to swear. It can be more concise and more accurate.

I agree as well, I really dislike the overly formal tone we've tended to adopt in order to signal that the content is important. If you have important stuff to say, it'll be important even if you use simple words to say it.

> I've joined jobs and the first thing people said to me is "ah, you must be the new cunt!"

The reaction to that welcome is highly location dependent.

I suspect the use of profanity was to grab people's attention, rather than for shock value. I would consider it as unprofessional, much as I would consider an article titled "Stars that go boom" to be unprofessional. I would suggest that it should be discouraged, mostly because we don't want scientific journals to come off sounding like tabloids. Yet I don't think that it automatically results in degraded discourse.

There is no profanity in that title.

“F**k” could be any number of things. (Shrugging guy emoji)

As a methodically scientific academically academic scientist myself I struggle to arrive at a firm and defensible position on what it could be.

I fucking approve!

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