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Comment by wat10000 | Hacker News Reader

Not believing that a prompt is an effective way to actually control their behavior is obviously incorrect to anyone who's actually used these things.

It's not a guaranteed way to control their behavior, but you can more than move the needle.

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The word most relevant to this conversation is “influence.” Influence is possible and users observe it and use it to increase margins of useful outcomes. “Control” is incorrect.

yeah that distinction is pretty important, and in general that guy I believe IS making the point - if you can not control it with guaranteed outcomes - you cannot control it.

You can't control it any more than you can control a draw from a deck of cards, but you can absolutely control the deck of cards that you choose to draw from.

The problem is that nobody really does that? Like, as far as I'm aware, even simple stuff such as not considering tokens that would result in a syntax error when writing code isn't being done.

magicians can probably make you change your mind on the former

That's silly. My car is not absolutely guaranteed to turn left when I turn the steering wheel left, but you wouldn't say I can't control my car on that basis.

Steering an LLM with a prompt is way less reliable than steering a car with a steering wheel, but there's still control. It's just not absolute.

if your car doesn' turn left when you turn the steering wheel left, the problem is that the car is broken, if an LLM does something unexpected after you gave it instructions, that's possible when the LLM is functioning entirely correctly.

Nothing in this world is guaranteed. That doesn't mean it's uniformly random either. LLMs can still do something unexpected if you give them clear instructions, but that doesn't mean it'll be arbitrary and unpredictable in scope. The same way C/C++ undefined behavior technically means program can give you nasal demons, but in reality it won't do anything unusual (like format your C:/ drive) unless someone purposefully coded it to do that.

This is all going to flash through your mind when your car mysteriously doesn't turn left. I would prefer to think of machines as things with defined outputs and failure is failure, more than as fluffy little kittens who might do the wrong thing, if the consequences are going to fall on someone who doesn't deserve it.

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