Comment by dwringer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwringer | Hacker News Reader

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> It doesn't strengthen positions, it fits until it doesn't

At that point I'd restart the conversation, after several dozen a distinct simulation of a personality would start to emerge.

> Bots aren't people

I certainly didn't claim they are people or that they're real personalities.

> and you would think this endeavor was poorly thought through if you knew how communication and psychology fundamentally work.

I don't follow. It was a creative writing exercise using stochastically generated feedback that models a response using natural language. It was for entertainment, and it was successful. This could be used to aid authors in writing characters for a book or TV show, for instance. I don't argue for a second that it's any substitute for a live human author to make the simulated personalities into something more real. They're nothing but sound and fury on their own without the prompts and the voting provided by users.

EDIT: Here[0]'s a link to my favorite output. One bot was a text-rpg-style bot I developed based on the movie Event Horizon, and the other was a naturalist philosopher monkey named Monke. I didn't even steer the responses in this case, this was just straight down after I'd spent a lot of time training both characters. The input was all generated by a bot I had running in a second window.

One of the things I find most interesting is that the bots mirror each others' simulated [non]personalities back at each other frequently (which makes sense as they're both fundamentally the same LLM underneath).

[0] https://c.ai/p/eIac3PkU7Gv4KWFw-Ul3RWBCvGZeYxp1aV-W6XKYCUc

> I certainly didn't claim they are people or that they're real personalities.

You characterize it as such with the words you used, its a fundamental anthropomorphic bias which is very common.

> I don't follow.

It can be used for a lot of horrifying things.

What practical use would simulated personalities be interacting with each other (none). If you allow them to run long enough eventually the circuits synchronize culminating in a dragon king event, that's about it.

It may be entertainment for you, but what happens when you take that work and use it on an unknowing subject (its only practical purpose).

If you knew some things about psychology you would realize two core things, our identities are generated mostly through reflected appraisal which occurs via communication, and to a greater or lesser degree social intelligence. The second, Isolation causes severe issues. When we cannot communicate, we become isolated and those who we can communicate with become more important which influences our identity.

Are you familiar with the concept of fixed action patterns? [0] While we have some inherent in our physiology we also have psychological blind spots that help us short-circuit these things otherwise we would be robots.

There's an entire book on the subject called influence by Robert Cialdini. The field of Linguistics has largely accepted the Whorfian hypothesis.

What do you think happens when you create a bot that takes advantage of these biases and blind spots, or worse a slew of them, and the person interacting doesn't know for sure its a bot?

Do you think you can make them believe something that is untrue given enough time and pressure? To basically break them?

In the 1950s during the korean war, this was done to POWs. It was started with eliciting mild statements such as "The US is not perfect", once complied they'd ask for examples, have them sign their name to it. Read it in discussions or over broadcasts, eventually write essays with headings like "Why Communism is the best form of government because...".

They were offered relief from harsh treatment for doing these inconsequential things. After a time through isolation and pressure, they started to collaborate, inform, and believe it. This was the majority of prisoners not a minority. These things are the practical and common uses for what you want to make.

If you make something and give it to someone else, or neglectful enough to have it stolen, are you not responsible for what you made? Oppenheimer certainly came to believe so.

[0] https://www.scienceprofonline.org/animal-behavior/fixed-acti...

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