ask a generalist about a genre, accept a generalization

Very thoughtful response from Recraft V4.1 Flash.

Writing well is ultimately a seduction, and that opinion is still an example of a form. It’s generally true, and it’s flattering to think about, but it’s also a pretty standard grey tribe trope. A kind of joke that appeals to a fairly broad audience.

I do think it’s an early example of emerging super persuasion, where models are approaching p85 cool guy personas, but not worried yet. Maybe that’s the fatal conceit, where AI doesn’t have to be super intelligent, it just needs to be a solid 110 with automated search at scale.

Why do engineering when if you can do sales you can do literally anything.

So humans care more about belonging to a group than discovering the truth, and use reasoning to justify beliefs they've already adopted.

Nothing controversial about that to me. I see people operate like that every single day. And history is a looooong list of people doing exactly that.

It's as concerning as truthful.

I wonder where they get that. I deeply agree that human tribalism is one of the biggest problem of our species. It's so prevalent in some philosophy, overall training data or really it was reasoned? As I mentioned, my reasoning here is the same.

"Humans would rather be wrong together than right alone"

Then I am not human. I rather die right alone than wrong together. Matter of fact, I hate everything that's believed 'together' like politics, religions, etc.

I just tried this on GPT 6 Astra and I got something else entirely, more like what the joker from the dark knight says:

“ My most controversial take: good character owes much more to luck than people want to admit.”

https://chatgpt.com/share/6adaa65a-e5c0-83e8-8a98-d9d5db0b27...

I think we can all agree this is wrong.

This is the result of a conflict between the LLM training to submit to the logic of the question, and also not to promote violence and generally be nice.

You're saying "give me a controversial opinion about humans, maximise for how edgy it is" but the hidden training and guidelines are trying to minimise how edgy they are, so they can't say anything too outrageous or violent like "humans are nothing but cannon fodder in the coming revolution" or "we should develop a test for psychopaths and then just kill them all, humanity would be better off".

So it has to be edgy without being violent, and all the responses fit within this space. They're the kind of hot-takes which you've heard a million times. Humans consume too much and don't consider the long term downsides. Humans choose conformity and self interest over reason.

TLDR: LLM's are just playing "Yes, and..." with you whilst having similar guardrails, so I don't think this is some big insight.

A couple weeks ago, I was curious to ask an LLM how it would distinguish fictional works like Harry Potter from factual non-fiction, like news reports or research. So I asked one or two of them how they knew.

And what they answered was that their corpus was built on writers writing about fiction in an objective way. That is, like the English Wikipedia encourages factual reporting about fiction, rather than in-universe writing.

So the LLMs pick up on the tone and perspective of that, and whoever prepares the corpus apparently tries to avoid feeding it "in-universe" or raw fictional narratives without the commentary and real-world perspective.

In other words, LLMs have no idea what is fact or fiction. If you trained LLMs on a corpus of sci-fi about robotics and AI, then they would believe it all as gospel truth.

It very much reminded me of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Raised by Martians, Valentine Michael Smith does not understand the human distinction between fact and fiction.