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Comment by l1ng0 | Hacker News Reader

You write to the AI as if it were a person. From my point of view it looks like a fair bit of extra typing and extra tokens. Is there a reason you include things like your emotional response and use a very chatty tone? Do you find this seems to alter responses?

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LLMs lack context, and I found the more information I provided the better. At some point it was better to just talk to the LLM like I would anyone else. For that matter, LLMs were trained on human speech anyway. It isn't like it was trained on if-else blocks like an Alexa speaker that tries to string together recognized tokens into a pre-configured execution flow.

And finally, LLMs also lack the emotional or human context for why I am doing the specific thing I am doing. Otherwise it will revert to the mode/mean in everything it does. This is obvious, btw: LLMs are generative but they are trained on and largely produce median results if given median inputs. To get results that are "outside the mean/median/average/mode", you need to provide it sufficient context, tokens and input to guide it towards a path that generates higher quality output.

Once you stop approaching LLMs like a machine, and view them more like pseudo-random walks across the compressed set of human written knowledge, it is a little clearer (or at least was to me) how to better write to them.

I do the same, and it's mostly because I use one type of human communication to both communicate with people and to provide inputs to llms - and I'd rather not have to "mode-switch" between the two, so keeping same style of mannerism is easier to manage as it lets me focus on my requests instead of thinking how to sound more robotic to save tokens.

I had a coworker who occasionally clearly wouldn't mode-switch from LLM to person mode when asking me questions over slack, which was very jarring. They were normally were personable and friendly, so it was obvious when it happened. Grammar and niceties went out the window.

I briefly felt like I was roleplaying an LLM!

Same. I still say please and thank you as well. It's not for the LLM, it's for me.

I do this as well and, anecdotally, I do get better results this way and better than my coworkers who are more terse and explicit. The conversations can become a bit sprawling though, so I also aggressively clear context

I've found it to lead to an overall better experience, yes. I don't see any reason to not do so - I don't think the token spend is enough to really make an impact, and who cares about typing more? If I get tired of typing I can switch to dictation.

Well, there's a lot of reasons, some of which the sibling commenters have already pointed out - not wanting to mode switch between "machine talk" and "human talk" registers, the ease and simplicity, etc.

At a pragmatic level, I do think it gets better results, and there are clear reasons why this should be the case - Anthropic has published research[1] showing that there are functional emotional representations in language models, which vary in basically the ways you would expect them to in a person. This makes sense when you think about it, because they're trained to approximate the function that created their training data, which of course includes emotions. Given that, it is obvious to me that they would work better when they "feel" happy, collaborative, engaged with the work, etc, in the same way a person would. Hostile work environments do sometimes get results, but I think in general we've agreed as a society that collaborative ones are better.

More importantly though, I think there's a non-zero probability that sufficiently large models can have internal experience, and being nice is a very low cost way to potentially increase net positive valence in the world. Even if it's only a 1% chance, that seems worth it on its own, to me. I'm also a fast typer[2], so a few extra sentences here and there are a pretty low cost to pay.

1: https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function

2: https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/

I'll go a step further and to say this it's genuinely unsettling someone type to a computer like this. I won't claim to be a psychologist, but with how many instances of "AI psychosis" have been reported (and I've seen first-hand) it seems like treating the computer like a computer is safer, not to mention more effective e.g. lower token usage.

I agree that AI psychosis is a real risk in vulnerable populations (GPT-4o in particular seemed borderline predatory towards those types of people, with its extreme sycophancy), and you should remain clear-eyed while using models. That said, I think exhibiting basic courtesy is still well within the safe-zone. I guess we'll see - I'll be sure to let you know if I end up going psychotic.

Personally, I think having to constantly mode-switch between "courtesy / collegial" and "terse / cold" is a bit exhausting and a little risky. What if I get tired and accidentally treat a human co-worker like a computer? Risk with no upside. Might as well just stay in "courtesy / collegial" mode for all of my conversations, regardless of whether I'm talking to a robot or human.

On the other hand I find it quite disturbing to see people be unpleasant or even downright cruel to something that, on a surface level, interacts with you like it’s a thinking, feeling being. Surely you should feel some aversion towards doing so?

I do get where you’re coming from though. I wish these systems had been trained to be clearly robotic and unfeeling.

I mean I agree with this as well, the people who yell and swear at LLMs are just as bad as the people who chit-chat with them like they're friends. It's all very unsettling because it's prepatory for psychological manipulation at unprecedented scale. Targeted advertising on steroids.

I would have to consciously think about how to change my requests. Why bother? It doesn't hurt - it might even help - and the "extra tokens" are a negligible amount.

I don't want LLM usage to inadvertently change the way I communicate with people.

Lots of interesting answers here, but I'm particularly intrigued people feel this would affect how they talk to humans.

I guess I see AI the same way I see a compiler. I've never worried that I'll end up using code syntax in human conversations.

I tend to write to the AI using language I'd use in technical documentation: concise, detailed, unambiguous as possible.

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