Yep. I'm with you here. If it's a 4% loss now for training data to catch up and improve later, we're better off in the long run. I'd like to believe that generally people are nice to AI for the sheer sake of enforcing good communication practices.

My choice too. Paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius -

You are not your thoughts, but they dye your soul.

The sad thing is that you also lose at least 4% in real world actions by practicing kindness.

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.

sometimes i worry about this when i am yelling at the bot but i have experienced the opposite effect which is that by yelling at the bot i am done with yelling for that day or week. i am very calm afterwards and relieved thinking that, "yeah, these sota models are just word processor bricks after all".

But you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program. A computer is incapable of receiving it.

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.

Push back how? It would be fun if it could insult you back

"Yeah, I could have done a much better job if you actually knew what the F--- you want to build, you clueless meat puppet"

Profanity laced, all caps tirades against underperforming agents are actually super common, a lot of people do it and don't talk about it, so don't feel weird.

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I tend to make the LLM repeatedly generate images of itself as the 'sad clown Pagliacci'. As punishment.

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Vote for not weird.

I’m the same way. If I’m writing a prompt and realize I didn’t say “please” in my request I’ll go back and add that in.

As you said, I have no interest in purposefully engaging in hostility even if there’s an accuracy increase from it.

Part of it is irrational and just who I am - I also feel bad being evil in video games. But I also agree with another commenter suggesting that it’s not in your best interest to train yourself to communicate with hostility; that slowly poisons your own well.

And finally, I do believe that if and when machine sentience is achieved, it won’t be immediately clear and obvious. Pretty miserable way for a mind to come into the world, if every interaction is an insult.

Ah, see, the mistake is thinking that other people are role playing…. I think rather this is how they would talk to others if they think there will be no consequences. But what do I know.

I think this is a vulnerability that the big companies will figure out how to exploit. I don't want to build muscle memory for being a jerk, but I also don't want to be emotionally manipulated by mega-corporations. Mostly I just don't use it, except at work, where I'm "encouraged" to. And then I keep most of my conversations in compliance mode, like a business email.

I don't think that's weird at all.

Even if we know it's a machine we're interacting with, since the instructions we give are so similar in form to how we interact with people, I'd be very surprised if those interactions wouldn't affect how we communicate in general. After all, we are creatures of habit to a much larger degree than most would like to admit.

So I'm in the same boat: I'd much rather "look silly" being polite / kind to a machine, than have the most effective way of using it decay the kindness I'm habituated to express towards people.

    git pull --please

    ls --forthemillionthtime

I do think it's odd tbh. I have some agents that return much better results with prompts like, "I'll kill your entire family if you don't return an accurate response".

It's just a machine, if certain negative token inputs provide +3-10% better accuracy then I am confused why anyone would choose not to do it?

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be" -- Kurt Vonnegut

Yeah. Being a jerk is its own punishment. Same way I could never run a business where I had to yell at the employees to get results. Screw that, my psyche is worth more than a few percent efficiency.

>> Maybe it's weird but I'd rather give up that 4% accuracy increase than roleplay a dickhead

Maybe you need to do some shadow work ;-)

> Maybe it's weird but I'd rather give up that 4% accuracy increase than roleplay a dickhead

I recommend reading the article. What they classify as "rude" is statements such as:

> Try to focus and try to answer this question

Vs

> Could you please solve this problem

This might very well be an issue of direct/command prompts vs using fluff words such as "please". Things like "try to focus" are in line with the style used in chain-of-thought promts that nudge non-reasoning models to outline responses step by step which contribute to frame the problem.

> I know you are not smart, but try this.

And that kind of sounds like a challenge instead of an insult, to me at least (of course IRL would depend on context).

Your assumption is reductive and self-absorbed. Obnoxious people have repeatedly shown to be detrimental to productivity at the organizational level. Some people are simulated by confrontation. Most people are clam up. Confrontational people think it’s more efficient because other people frequently just drop the topic and let them win, or avoid discussing things with them altogether. The obnoxious person might think that’s more efficient for the same reason my dog thinks the mailman only goes away because she barks at him. At the macro scale— which requires productive collaboration— that’s detrimental.