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Comment by arendtio | Hacker News Reader

Yes, there are many use cases where emotional voices are not needed, but that's not the point.

The core is not to have emotional voices, but to train neural networks to emulate emotions (not just for voices). Humans are very emotional beings, and if you want to communicate with them effectively, you will need the emotional layer. Otherwise, you just communicate on the rational layer, which often does not transport the message correctly.

Think of humans as 20% rational and 80% emotional.

And I say that as a person who believed for a long time that I was 80% rational and just 20% emotional ;-)

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But there is no message outside the rational layer when you're talking to a non-human. The only message is the amount of true information the LLM is able to output - the rest is randomness. It's fatiguing to have your human brain try to interpret emotions and social dynamics where they don't exist, the same way it's fatiguing to try and interpret meaning from a generated image.

I am sure that if you talk to a dog, it will probably take as much from your emotions as your words (to disprove your point about non-humans).

You look at it in binary categories, but instead, it is always some amount of information and some amount of randomness. An LLM can predict emotions similarly to words. Emotions and social dynamics from an LLM are as valid as the words it speaks. Most of the time, they are correct, but sometimes they are not.

The real difference is that LLMs can be trained to cope with emotions much better ;-)

Yes, fair enough about the dog - "non-human" was the wrong choice of words. But I don't agree that emotions and social dynamics from an LLM are valid. Emotions need real stakes behind them. They communicate the inner state of another being. If that inner state does not exist (maybe it could in an AGI, but I don't believe it could in an LLM), then I'd say the communication is utterly meaningless.

> communication is utterly meaningless.

Well, at least to some extent. I mean, changing the inner state of an AI (as they are being built today) certainly is, because it does not affect other beings. However, the interaction might change your inner state. Like looking at an AI-generated image and finding it beautiful or awful. Similarly, talking to Miles or Maya might let you feel certain emotions.

I think that part can be very meaningful, but I also agree that current AI is built to not carry its emotional state into the world outside of the direct interaction.

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