Don't normalize being an asshole to anyone or anything, machine or not.
It's as silly (to me) to argue that it's degrading to people to treat non-people well. It seems self-obvious that the inverse is true. It benefits the do-er of the deed and makes it that much easier to spread good will when applied to situations where it doesn't matter on the other end. It shows good stewardship as well.
I'd also make the argument that as inference becomes a feedback loop into training, it only reinforces that we're probably going to benefit from future models ingesting data containing unnecessary politeness.
And for the other parts. I just don't agree - maybe sure, it probably wouldn't be healthy to constantly be negative at a machine (or even a wall) for hours a day.
But, let's say I work 8 hours, I spend 2 hours with an llm, and in those two hours I spend 10 minutes with some very negative prompts text for greater accuracy. And I spend 3 hours with family/friends, which is of course nearly exclusively positive interactions.
Do you genuinely think those 10 minutes of negative prompts are actually meaningfully turning one into a mean/negative person towards other people?
Genuinely, is that the argument you are making?
I genuinely believe it’s preventing you from becoming a better person by engaging in psychopathic behavior. If I were writing the things you describe in this thread I would be ashamed to have my loved ones read over my shoulder.
You could not pay me enough money to spend 10 minutes a day to write that stuff, even under full certainty it went into the void with no association back to me.
But I'm not here to pontificate about who's a better person and don't really care.
You're mindset sounds kind of painful to me to be honest. Obviously we are just very different types of people. I've had family see my chats plenty of times and we laugh about this stuff - it couldn't mean less to any of us.
I've no desire to try to change your mind. I can't. But clearly you do care because you've been both quite defensive and assertive in tackling opposing points of view.
My hope is to inspire others to be more creative in their use of AI. It interesting (but not exactly unsurprising) that prompt politeness can inhibit accuracy. Surely there are lessons here than can translate into how help other people out through clear, direct language that avoids the pitfalls of being rude or coddling.
I'd say it's fairly normal and human of me to have some kind of reaction to that, no?
You must understand that speaking to other people like that will result in them reacting and being less conducive to productive conversation.
We will probably never see eye to eye on this.
You: negative tokens for higher accuracy on inanimate objects is psychopathic behavior. I want you to stop and I see you as a psychopath - although it is resulting in nothing bad to any living being.
Me: Using negative tokens on an inanimate object returns significant improval on accuracy. It does zero harm to any living being. This is a completely neutral action.
Are you upset (or concerned) about people watching movies with violence in them, or playing games where you can and do kill things?
I'm still extremely kind and polite to everybody in real life, and feel very deeply about people - how I treat them, and care for their emotional state.
There is absolutely zero crossover between getting a text machine to return a result vs a real human.
I wouldn't even think to justify such a thing. The llm gives a better accuracy to a negative weighted token input, I don't understand how this is so upsetting to people?
I'm actually very shocked to see the responses - as everyone I know uses these tactics to get more accuracy, and there's nothing remotely abusive or meaningful to us.
Maybe there are more 'ai is sentient' type people on hackernews than I realized.
Being an asshole to a machine is still being an asshole.
So boxing is violent. And I have chosen to box in my past. Does that mean I'm a violent person now? Even though I go out of my way to deescalate real fights?
I play games as the villain and and mass murder people in the game. Does that mean I'm a violent extremist?
If you are an asshole to a computer, then you have created similarly biases in my expectations about your potential behavior toward humans.
Observations create expectations. Be an asshole in any context, and people will assume you can be an asshole in other contexts.
Simple solution: never be an asshole.
If you are scared and mad about it - I guess we won't be friends, which is likely the best for both our mental sanity.
And the "me" that lives in a tiny southern town just to help my 95 year old grandma in her last years at the expense of my economic prospects is a facade.
The "me" that helps my aging neighbor when she's sick for no reason is a facade.
The "me" that hugs and loves my wife when I get home is a facade.
The "me" that brushes my aging dogs teeth every night because she has dental issues is a facade.
The "me" that flies to my friend I haven't seen for years and takes care of them after extreme health issues is a facade.
But,the "me" that puts tokens in a token machine in a way that gets better accuracy is the "real" me.
Oh. I also play violent video games where I murder people sometimes as well. Do you think that makes me secretly a murderer too?
This is not a game of having done X good things in life and therefore being afforded the right to do Y bad things. You are making a choice to say, "I am allowing myself to treat this thing I believe is lesser than me in a way I willingly acknowledge is bad." That's your thesis. I wholeheartedly disagree with it.
So yeah, I whole heartedly with 100% of my being think llms are just an input/output/processing computer, I don't think they are aware, feeling, sentient beings.
So yeah, putting negative sentences in a processing machine that forces it to return higher accuracy results is something I don't have any feelings about.
I'd never yell at a cat or a dog. I'd never be mean to another person. As those aren't just hardware/software. I'd be fine smashing a rock violently. Or entering a negative text in a language model.
Putting negative tokens in a machine is no different than playing a violent video game to me. It's not about, oh I'm a good person - so I can do bad things. It's just a neutral thing.