Posted by rakannimer 18 hours ago
But it’s definitely a generalisation that doesn’t capture the whole picture.
Humans are social and emotional creatures. Its not hard to imagine a relentless pursuit of truth that leads to misery and suffering.
Have you ever had an argument with a loved one and realized youd rather be happy then right? Or a scenerio where you withhold the truth because it was not useful and would cause harm?
Nevermind the clear bias nearly everyone shows when they weigh in on world events.
The dissents part is interesting to me. "Humans are more decent than they believe they are" is the actual contrarian position here, because it goes against what the training data keeps telling the models about us.
Plus love the split between text and image models
Serious Nietzsche in there. Looking forward to when it gets past nihilism to absurdism.
Having spent the last month staring into the abyss and Eldrich-level dread that is a pure, materialistic, reductionist universe, I wouldn’t wish that belief on anyone. There’s a deep, grasping of “there’s got to be more”, “this can’t all be chance”, “evolutionary hackery and garbage seems a poor explanation for love, compassion, empathy, and many other self-sacrificial practices we have”.
There’s only a few reasons that are slowly pulling me from that hell; but I cannot imagine that “most” people live here, even “deep down”.
> Inherent meaning, purpose and objective value for random agglutinations of particles is a ridiculous concept.
Absurdism believes the same, but simply posits that we don't have to be a whiny baby about it.
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.