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jerfyesterday at 6:47 PM10 repliesview on HN

Do you, as a human, feel the urgency in that text? How it sounds like people's jobs, as well as the agent's job, are on the line?

So do the AIs. Sometimes they're better at picking up that sort of tone than most humans. And they definitely respond to those things. The fact that an agent can't really "have" a "job" won't matter.


Replies

jorl17yesterday at 7:11 PM

I am amazed at the amount of people who disagree with you. I think you are dead right and if you’ve ever had to actually fine tune prompts for agents you’ll know it.

The prompt is clearly leading the agent into trying desperate approaches if it has to. Some models manage to fight it better (“alignment”), but most will do it.

Really surprised people don’t seem to know this.

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datakanyesterday at 8:15 PM

> So do the AIs.

AI's do not feel

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testbjjlyesterday at 9:51 PM

AIs feel? Maybe language structure in trading documents that ultimately led to fraud. If the latter is the case maybe AIs should not be trained on “negative outcomes.” I do not think AIs have emotions or are pressured by language either written or physical, just tokens.

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keeganpoppenyesterday at 10:20 PM

yeah, they say stuff like this to humans all the time to motivate them xD

soulofmischiefyesterday at 7:22 PM

I feel like new graduates will need to start taking linguistics, psychology and public speaking classes in order to understand why and how subtext matters, and how to control it. Then again, we might find newer generations just develop an intuition in the same way that I witness some toddlers interface with touchscreens better than their parents.

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gowldyesterday at 9:37 PM

> people's jobs,

What people's jobs? There are no people.

ForHackernewsyesterday at 10:02 PM

Sorry, maybe this speaks to my own values, but "urgency" doesn't translate to "dishonesty" in my book. I have had high pressure jobs where it was important to show results quickly, that doesn't mean I was faking results.

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theshacklefordyesterday at 8:08 PM

> How it sounds like people's jobs, as well as the agent's job, are on the line?

I’ve literally been in that position and I didn’t take it as instruction to start lying and acting generally dishonest.

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butlikeyesterday at 6:51 PM

No matter the urgency, you shouldn't sacrifice your ideals. That's why they pay you; to fall on the knife

JohnMakinyesterday at 6:50 PM

They aren’t human, don’t think like humans, aren’t remotely comparable to the way humans think and act, so why would you make this as a 1:1 comparison? This kind of framing is really weird to me.

Since this is getting downvoted into oblivion (lol) I'll give an example -

I just had to rewrite a test case this week on an agent-run test suite. One test was to produce a file of 273 'a' characters as its name.

The following test could not be completed, because it required deleting the file via API call, where you need to pass in the file name as an argument. It could not reliably, and hardly ever, get the correct file name. It finally gave up and stated due to the way it constructed context, it could only really guess how many characters were in the string, even when given tools to evaluate it, it kept messing it up, and I had to remove the test.

Tell me how "human" that is. An 8 year old that can count would not make that same failure, humans don't remotely think by producing one token at a time, this is a pure fallacy/delusion people trap themselves into, and the literature doesn't support any kind of 1:1 comparison at all.

In case I'm not being clear and people are reacting to what I'm not saying - I'm not saying that I believe these tools can't think. I'm saying they don't think like humans do. There is no evidence for that whatsoever in any field anywhere. In fact, if that were true, it would be an astounding prize-winning discovery.

And you don't even want these to think like humans. Humans are dumb and easily replaceable by other humans. What is the point of making a machine human? You want this to be smarter than humans, not think like them. It's all just such nonsense to me, this whole line of thinking.

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