I’d rather lose 4% accuracy and practice kindness! I’ve been actively trying to avoid raging at the bot because I worry about this behaviour leaking into real world interactions
I'm 42. I have found that a depressingly large number of times in my life, being kind has got me precisely nowhere, whilst turning around and being decidedly unkind has made people move. I still always prefer kindness, and only resort to cruelty when kindness does not work - and to be clear this isn't some kind of "you are not bending to my impetuous whim", rather "you are not doing the one thing that you are being paid to do".
I've also found the same applies to me. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
So - I think the LLMs are just responding accurately to a real social phenomenon.
We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity. You be kind hoping the other person will reciprocate. That is the social contract. AI cannot participate in this, yet.
Edit: Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive. If there is no receiver, there is no kindness.
Apparently some people get a dopamine hit from roleplaying kindness toward inanimate objects. Whatever turns you on, no hang ups here. For me, that dopamine hit is not worth the 4% intelligence tax.
Yet, this law is so embedded in us that practicing kindness even towards a rock makes us feel good.
So practice kindness, first and foremost for yourself.
Edit: Also, your feeling good after being kind essentially completes the transaction. But I know being kind to an LLM has zero impact on that LLM and I feel silly pretending it does.
I guess, in some pendantic interpretation, but that doesn't seem relevant. Whether I am "practicing" or "roleplaying", I do it too, and I don't expect reciprocity.
Do you have any evidence to back up your arbitrary claims? Even with decades of research, people are still unsure about these emotions yet you think your pedantic assumption about kindness is the most and only correct interpretation of it!
Anyways, I highly doubt this discussion is relevant here.
I'll not reach for the easy response and say "Be kind to the Earth" fails your definition without reaching for pedantry with "the Earth has living things" because the Earth is instead a wet rock that cannot understand kindness, yet we show it.
It's not the bot im worried about, it's the fact I may be wrong, and I don't want to be rude to an under-paid guy working overseas.
Would a plant or insect fall under this definition?
And yet rubber duck debugging is a thing
Mine does not have anything to do with being kind to a computer program.
Citation please.
Without examining the corpus, it's entirely possible that the training corpus has better results when you are kind to it, so one can imagine a situation where "reception of kindness" is meaningful, and in principle if you were an AI provider, you could RLHF your way to "being rude gets you worse results" as a means to train the human users.
You are not your thoughts, but they dye your soul.
> "We are what we repeatedly do. [Kindness], therefore, is not an act, but a habit."
If he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.