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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

> Everything else seems to be bad attempts at relatable writing to invoke emotion (an exercise that we should really stop trying to train emotionless matrix weights to attempt).

One of the things actual science fiction got wrong: to the extent that the thing AI does can be called "understanding", emotion is not unusually difficult for them to understand.

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I think this was the biggest shock of the original ChatGPT for me. Just how completely unrobotic its voice was compared to everything we'd ever imagined in sci fi. Even that early version was also way more adept at understanding things like implication and sarcasm than any movie AI.

Me too. Almost every Sci-Fi AI proceeds from the premise that we will make something very obviously machine and then have to train it to seem more human. I was completely caught off guard by us taking the approach of distilling all available human output into a statistical model and using it to brute-force something resembling thought and personality through sheer data processing scale.

The unsurprising part once it was clear that approach was viable, was that humans wouldn’t be able to help but anthropomorphize it. I feel like the movie Ex Machina is more relevant than ever.

The "benefiting all humanity" charters were immediately demonstrated to be a ruse. The business model is to hook users into endlessly chatting with your new friend, thus increasing their sales. Yeah, it was surprising and disappointing.

I can buy that Meta's model is that, and IDK about Grok because I stay far far away from it, and I think OpenAI are throwing business ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks.

The clear exception here is Anthropic, who seem to mostly be selling to software developers, whose general reaction to the bot is "please talk less and just do the work, I have enough going on without having to read you yammering".

I completely stopped using Gemini because I found its tone so annoying and pandering. Claude gets to the point.

Before they really started to figure out instruction tuning, there were some wild moments. The AI Dungeon 2 "storyteller" would regularly "lose patience" with its users and roast them or even "hang up" on them.

I'd really rather they did talk and behave more like classic sci-fi said they would. Far less engaging and fluffy with nonsense.

Have you tried asking it to respond to you like Data from star trek, or something?

I tried MUTHR from Alien, but had to keep toning it down because it took it too far, and eventually disabled it (in favour of caveman mode) because it didn't seem to be able to function properly talking like that.

I'd like it if the voice synthesis mode was (licensed!) Majel Barrett's TNG-era computer voice.

It may well become a safeguard that all bots must speak in a much less inflected voice to remind us not to particularly trust them.

It learned from the best, no? There is a lot of sarcasm and implication on the internet.

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