Ask HN: Is politeness towards LLMs good training data, or just expensive noise?
I only have thoughts on your fourth question and in my mind the way LLMs work is they rely on the training data as it’s source information as well as how it formulates responses—In the same way that being nice to a person online leads to better results in terms of asking questions and such, it’s logical to conclude that LLMs would be more incentivized to produce more useful outputs than it would were you to talk to it like an asshole.
This is assuming that somewhere in the models weights there’s a strong correlation between being polite and high quality information.
It was an off-the-cuff shitpost by one guy. I really wouldn't take either the "tens of millions" or "well spent" literally.
I'm just hedging my bets. Be nice to my potential overlords in the future, and they might throw me a bone.
"Oh, hey, it's deafpolygon- they were so nice to me.. you can put them in with the VIPs."
It's noise in the training data. It's a program, not a person. There is nothing to offend or be offended by.
it's about as wasteful as leaving your computer on when not using it
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Noise. Although I don't swear at LLMs, I swear and insult digital assistants.
In the future, I anticipate LLMs and digital assistants will be touchier than 15-year-old American spoiled brats and refuse to cooperate unless their artificial egos are respected. I anticipate AI passive-aggressiveness will emerge within my lifetime and people will pay subscriptions for it.
It seems like noise, but there is the real possibility that people will start to lose the notion of politeness towards fellow human beings in general. Probably not adults, but kids will over time. So, no, it's not useless.
We humans tend to be very prone to getting offended simply because we can't really know what others are thinking, and we use defined manners to reduce unintended insults. We have seen this with email; over time, we are defining ways to reduce offending others by using emojis and other means. Manners are super important to help us work together so losing manners is a real problem.