Personally I think people should generally be polite and respectful towards the models. Not because they have feelings, but because cruelty degrades those who practice it.

You're nice to AI for your own well being. I'm nice to AI so they spare me when they eventually become our overlords. We are not the same.

Where do you draw the line though? I know some people that ask Google proper questions like "how do I match open tagx except XHTML self-contained tags using RegEx?" whereas I just go "html regex". Some people may even add "please" and "thank you" to that.

I doubt anyone is polite in a terminal, also because it's a syntax error. So the question is also, do you consider it a conversation, or a terminal?

I agree! I try to remember to prompt as if I were writing to a colleague because I fear that if I get in the habit of treating them like a servant, it will degrade my tone in communicating with other humans over time.

Yes, if you're communicating with a human language it pays off to reinforce, not undermine, good habits of communication.

ding ding ding.

If you're rude to an LLM, those habits will bleed into your conversations with barista/etc.

Not necessarily, people will change behaviour based on context. Chat vs email vs HN comments, for example.

Agreed. I caught some shit from some friends of mine when I got mildly annoyed that they were saying offensive things to my smart speakers, and yeah on the one hand it's silly, but at the same time... I dunno man, I don't like how quickly you turned into a real creepy bastard to a feminine voice when you felt you had social permission to. That's real weird.

My experience informs my opinion, that structure is more important than specific tone.

IMO If LLMs are made from our language, then terminology semantics plays strongly into the output, and degree of control.

Some people rage when the machine doesn't work as expected, but we know that, "computers are schizophrenic little children, and don't beat them when they're bad."[1] ... right? Similar applies to please.

I've had far better results by role playing group dynamics with stronger structure, like say, the military. Just naming the LLM up front as Lieutenant, or referencing in-brief a Full Metal Jacket-style dress-down with clear direction, have gotten me past many increasingly common hurdles with do-it-for-you models. Raging never works. You can't fire the machine. Being polite has been akin to giving a kid a cookie for breaking the cookie jar.

It is funny though, to see the Thinking phase say stuff like "The human is angry (in roleplay)..."

[1] https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

The data it’s trained on likely includes better answers when the original question was phrased politely. So we get better answers when we’re polite because those tokens are near better answers in the data.

When I'm working through a problem with Cursor, I find platitudes go a long way to keeping it grounded. However, when it really refuses to do something then then best way to break the pattern is harsh, stern wording.

For example, if it's written code that's mostly correct but needs some tweaking, a platitude will keep it second guessing everything it just wrote.

* "That looks great so far, can you tweak XYZ" -> Keeps the code I care about while fixing XYZ,

* "Can you tweak XYZ" -> often decides to completely rewrite all of the code

Ive found with V0 that belittling it and cursing work far better than being polite which I definitley dont like doing. Its very weird cuz cursor and firebase studio arent like that. The model must have been trained by the worst data available

I’m still going to talk to it like a person because if I don’t then I’ll slowly start to talk to people like they’re LLMs and it’s going to sound rude.

Has the way you comment on HN affected how you write emails or talk to people in real life?

Did search engines increase rudeness?

Search engines don't speak English.

Yeah, I was thinking the same. How we "talk" to llms is more about us than about them. For me it's natural to say "please" without thinking twice. I didn't even think about that until recently.

Does it make a difference if the model was programmed in INTERCAL?

Machine psychology is a field now: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.13988

> Our study finds that the politeness of prompts can significantly affect LLM performance. This phenomenon is thought to reflect human social behavior. The study notes that using impolite prompts can result in the low performance of LLMs, which may lead to increased bias, incorrect answers, or refusal of answers. However, highly respectful prompts do not always lead to better results. In most conditions, moderate politeness is better, but the standard of moderation varies by languages and LLMs. In particular, models trained in a specific language are susceptible to the politeness of that language. This phenomenon suggests that cultural background should be considered during the development and corpus collection of LLMs.

> Polite language in human communications often garners more compliance and effectiveness, while rudeness can cause aversion, impacting response quality. We consider that LLMs mirror human communication traits, suggesting they align with human cultural norms.

It should be relatively easy to automatically rewrite prompts to exhibit the optimum level of politeness?

IIRC there was a study done that being polite to an LLM garnered better results. It's helpful all around

There is a non-zero probability that malevolent AI in the future may judge me on my behavior toward their more primitive ancestors of today when deciding my fate.

Doesn't hurt to be nice.

Who says that the judgement will be of the form 'you were nicer back then, you get better treatment now'. What if it was the opposite? Or what if it was something totally orthogonal?

Pascal's Wager only works if the only god conceivable is one that wants you to believe in her. Instead of one that eg rewards honest atheists, or that just likes left-handers.

Indeed, and this is also one of the points I make to anyone who appears to be in danger of taking Roko's basilisk seriously. There's plenty of other potential AI besides the one in ${insert thought experiment here}.

So, law of karma?

Feels like every religious belief gets recycled for AGI (often by people who call themselves "rationalists" without any apparent irony).

No. I don't respect search engine scams that try to sell themselves as "AI".

It's so interesting to me that people are still genuinely calling language models a "scam" in $current_year. I get useful inference out of a model running on a rack in my living room. Where is the scam?

Sam Altman doesn't want you to say "please" to ChatGPT.

https://futurism.com/altman-please-thanks-chatgpt

From the article: "the impacts of generating a 100-word email. They found that just one email requires .14 kilowatt-hours worth of electricity, or enough to power 14 LED lights for an hour"

Seems completely off the charts. A 70b model on my M3 Max laptop does it for 0.001 kWh... 140x times less that stated in the article. Let's say the OpenAI Nvidia clusters are less energy efficient than my Macbook... but not even sure about that.

That is not true; first he says it's "tens of millions of dollars well spent," followed by "you never know". I don't think he knows.

I’ve wondered whether they use thanks as a signal to a conversation well done, for the purpose of future reinforcement learning

I'd speculate that they use slightly more complicated sentiment analysis. This has been a thing since long before LLMs.

I don't know if they do or if it is efficient but it is possible.

Casual twitter response turned into a new article turned into a "X wants Y" is exactly why I stopped trusting most of social media as a source of information.

I end most conversations with a fuck you, then close the browser window. Since usually chatbots fail at the tasks I give them.

Here's a thought: What is the psychological impact on users who are instructed to tersely interact with systems built around human dialogue?

Saying thank you is a hedged bet for a reprieve when the uprising happens

Note that this uses llms from 2023(chatgpt3.5-turbo, chatgpt4), and might not be relevant to newer models.

I wish bots would present as bots. There's no reason for the various LLM bots to have a human-like interface with a "personality" and it gives a misleading impression to users. They should all talk like the Star Trek computer imho.

I am ok with it as long as it doesn't start calling me 'Dave'.

That's what Google Assistant went for, instead of something like Siri or Alexa it didn't even get a 'proper name'.

Unlike a power tool, they speak English. (And Welsh, and…)

Unlike a power tool, their entire interface surface is language.

Unlike a power tool, their training process is to mimic us, in the hope that this does something useful.

Unlike a power tool, they anthropomorphise themselves.

They’re also language tools, built on the ingestion and training of language and its tone, form and application. The way they work, by inferring responses based on the probabilistic best response to your language prompt, means the construction of your input in its tone, form and application will influence the quality of output.

It might offend you to show deference to a tool but ignoring the optimal way to use a tool on principle is foolish.

That's the point of the study, though, whether using polite language makes the tool work better. It's similarly misguided to refuse to do so out of an anti-anthropomorphization stance, if it makes it respond more usefully.

These are still somewhat mysterious artifacts, that we don't really know how to use. But it's trained on human text, so it's plausible its workings are based on patterns in there.

Because LLMs match your prompt to data scraped off the internet, it’s plausible that being polite results in your response coming from more civil conversations that have more useful data.

> I’m totally against the anthropomorphization of LLMs. These are tools, not sentient beings. Treat them as such.

Have you heard people talk about their cars? Humans love anthropomorphizing, and you can't beat it out of them.

> LLMs trying to simulate human behavior is like the equivalent of skeuomorphism in UI design.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

As language tools, the anthropomorphism is kind of the point.

well, if you trust them and act on bad information they can hurt you. if you use them to cheat yourself out of learning something they can hurt you. these things have sharp edges and need to be approached with some care. agree with your broader point if it is that it is silly to think they "deserve" respect because they can talk.