Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I’m alone here but I don’t want my computer to have a personality or attitude, whether positive or negative. I just want it to execute my command quickly and correctly and then prompt me for the next one. The world of LLMs is bonkers.

View on HN

People have managed to anthropomorphize rocks with googly eyes.

An AI that sounds like Eeyore is an absolute treat.

Genuine People Personalities. Sounds ghastly.

Come to think of it maybe a Marvin one would be funnier than Eeyore.

I am happy to anthropomorphise a rock with googly eyes. It is when the rock with googly eyes starts to anthropomorphise itself that I get creeped out.

Stop anthropomorphizing LLMs, they don't like it.

Or Marvin, the Paranoid Android: “I have a brain the size of a planet and you are asking me to modify a trivial CSS styling. Now I’m depressed.”

I want it to have the personality and attitude of a rough hard-boiled chain-smoking detective from the 1950s. I would pay extra to unlock that

I agree, but I'm not even sure that's possible on a foundational level. If you train it on human text so it can emulate human intelligence it will also have an emulated human personality. I doubt you can have one without the other.

Best one can do is to try to minimize the effects and train it to be less dramatic, maybe a bit like Spock.

You could train it to respond in the third person with no point-of-view, like a Wikipedia article, so that it never even refers to itself as "I".

Absolutely. I'm annoyed by the "Sure!" that ChatGPT always start with. I don't need the kind of responses and apologies and whatnot described in the article and comments. I don't want that, and I don't get that, from human collaborators even.

The biggest things that annoy me about ChatGPT are its use of emoji, and how it ends nearly every reply with some variation of “Do you want me to …? Just say the word.”

Anecdotally that never seems to happen with o3. Only with 4o. I wonder why 4o is so... cheerful.

o3 loves to spit out tons of weird Unicode characters though.

I only sparsely use LLMs and only use chatgpt and sometimes Gemini or Claude, so maybe that's normal across all LLMs.

I like talking to Claude. It’s often too optimistic, but at least I never have to be worried it doesn’t like the task I give it.

Thank you! I honestly don’t get how people don’t notice this. Gemini is the only major model that, on multiple occasions, flat-out refused to do what I asked, and twice, it even got so upset it wouldn’t talk to me at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com