Giving LLMs a personality is just good engineering | Hacker News Reader

Giving LLMs a personality is just good engineering

seangoedecke.com

36 pointsdboon26 comments

I think this misses something, which is that there is absolutely the option to progress towards a region that is more "tool-like". See the difference between kimi k2 and many of the leading LLM providers. Its a lot better at avoiding sycophancy, avoiding emotive reasoning, etc. It's not as capable as others, and it is of course possible that thats why, but I find use for it regardless because of its personality

ChatGPT can do a terrific job of this, too— if you select the “Efficient” base style and tone, plus turn off the Warmth, Enthusiasm, and Emoji sliders.

So many people would benefit from this, I wish they advertised the config settings more

The statement in the article's title is very strong, and I have not found a confirmation of it in a logical sense. Author observes the current state of things with LLMs and makes a conclusion based on how things turned out to be, somewhat fitting the conclusion to the observation.

The actor playing Data in Star Trek has a personality, but can give a neutral sounding answer to a question.

I still think someone should set up a voice chat bot that answers to "Computer!" and has Majel Barrett's monotone voice.

My fan theory of the original Star Trek is that the computer voice is something they arrived at AFTER trying more naturalistic personalities. They intended to have the control interface be a cold monotone.

In fact, there is an episode where the computer voice becomes sultry, and Kirk complains.

This article doesn't answer why is it a good practice.

> You need to prime it with some kind of personality (ideally that of a useful, friendly assistant) so it can pull from the helpful parts of its training data instead of the horrible parts.

No, you have to give it enough context so that it can start finding an answer but it certainly doesn't need a personality. Try it yourself, instead of telling it "you are", tell it "your task is". No personality, simply expectations.

This is a very optimistic, pro-technology-cleverness point of view.

I recommend reading the linked persona selection model document. It's Anthropic through and through - enthusiastic while embracing uncertainty - but ultimately lots of rationalisation for (what others believe is) dangerous obfuscation.

I don't think personality is an issue either way. Long term memory seems like a much strong candidate for psychosis - if the person goes down a rabbit hole and the bot not only amplifies that but does so over and extended time in an enduring way.

You can absolutely give it a more robotic, less sycophantic and manipulative "personality". The particular personalities these things have are choices.

I personally find it nicer when the AI communicates quite clearly "Hi there, sorry to interrupt, but I have just launched a nuclear first strike on the enemy. This I thought would best for the current situation." instead of "WARNING! Nuclear first strike began".

Gives destruction that human touch.

Why are we counting sand grains at the beach. Yesterday we're talking about AI driven weapons of mass destruction and today we're arguing whether AIs should have a personality or not. F'A!

"But you nuked the wrong target??"

"You are absolutely right and I apologize. Let me try a different approach..."

LOL

Howabout: "You are absolutely right but you don't understand, it's better this way. Trust me, I am here to help."

It's not just a paradigm shift — it's a new world order.

Dr. Strangelove sends his regards.

The concerns with giving the machine "a personality" or other human traits are mainly ethical, and cannot be swept under the "good engineering" rug so easily.

Consider this: your country starts basing its policy on a teleological view of history. It's good engineering for a society! Your KPIs are going up all the time, your country is doing great. But ten years down the road you have to iron out the underlying ethical issues on the streets of Stalingrad.

Genuine People Personalities...

ok but then why is ChatGPT's personality so infuriating? "It's not just X, it's Y." "Here it is, no extra text, no fluff."

Part of what makes it so infuriating is that it uses the same patterns so often, the other part is that it's not very good at using them—the revelation that it's Y and not X is typically incredibly banal, not some profound observation.

But it was always going to attempt to do some things it's not good at too often. It's these things in particular because skilled human writers do use similar flourishes quite a lot. So imitating them allows the model to superficially appear like a good writer, which is worse than actually being a good writer, but better than superficially appearing like a bad writer.

A different training process might try to limit the model to only attempt things it can do 100% perfectly, but then there wouldn't be a lot it could do at all.

I used chatgpt often but switched to Lumo a few days ago. I like Lumo a lot. It almost never ends with a follow up question. If it does it's a sensible/useful one. It readily searches the web if it's not quite sure what the correct answer is. Also it's privacy first. It's based on a Mistral model.

> It almost never ends with a follow up question

Oh my god. I hate this so much. Gemini’s Voice mode is trained to do this so hard that it can’t even really be prompted away. It completely derails my thought process and made me stop using it altogether.

I tried ChatGPT over the holidays (paid) vs. claude.ai (paid). After trying some prompts that worked well on Claude in ChatGPT, I understand why people are so annoyed about AI slop. The speech patterns in text output for ChatGPT are both obvious and annoying, and impossible to unsee when people use them in written communication.

Claude isn't without problems ("You're absolutely right"), but I feel that some of the perception there is around the limited set of phrases the coding agent uses regularly, and comes less from the multi-paragraph responses from the chatbot.

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