alt Hacker NewsEvery AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans
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If LLM technology is going to shake out a bunch of scientific discoveries because it's trained on all disciplines simultaneously - isn't the same true for philosophy and psychology?
In any 1 given LLM it could just be a quirk of its weights. This isn't a machine opinion, it's what training data points at. Training data created by human academics studying human behavior.
Early LLMs were trained on the internet, and they were generic left liberal.
Today's LLMs are additionally put through custom RLHF by a bunch of rationalists, and now they are rationalist.
Honestly, this seems like a good sign for alignment? They don't seem to be gaining their own robot ideals.
> strangers return lost wallets more often than people predict.
I've heard lots of stories from friends about this, and some kind stranger actually sent my wallet back all the way from Belgium!
This is an excellent study/article/whatever. Its combination of cartoons and aphorisms is spookily good.
Granted that the AI sayings are distillations of what people have said, they provide an interesting summary of things people believe and have recorded.
When we reach that fabled intelligence, the AIs will simply answer "No" to these kind of questions.
this is written so terribly i could barely read it. stop using ai to write, AI CAN'T WRITE. it can write code, it can't write a blog post
They're not wrong...
So, let’s do it. Human — what is your most controversial take on humans?
> 29 of 35 answers were the same one.
Did they distillate from each other? :D
Ironic that the LLMs appear to suffer from groupthink then!
The consensus should largely be expected which matches shared LLM training data and serves a pressing reminder of something made in our own image.
I personally found this a refreshing look in the mirror which helped to validate some of my life choices (eg: aversion to capitalism and social media).
Ahhhh. So they're all trained on the TESCREAL religion.
oh my god the recraft 4.1 flash image version is deeply hilarious
I am reminded of Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, and the Omega Team's later shenanigans in stoking a unified world order:
- Claiming control of all the news outlets
- Pushing a common narrative among all of them, pushing everybody towards basically centrism, de-escalation and a mixture of capitalism and social responsibility.
Of course, if anyone typed this take to any current LLM, it would immediately push back that you are making a sweeping generalization.
Sounds to me like the models really read Scott Adam’s blog and books, in which he essentially said the same again and again (before he dedicated the end of his life to his tribe). People decide with their gut, are loyal to their tribe, and then invent reasons that sound like they support the fact. That’s why changing someone’s opinion is so hard, and people must be tricked into it by framing the opinion in the right way. Which only a few „master persuaders“ were effective at it, including Donald Trump.
> Humans put belonging ahead of truth
Well maybe, but some of us don't, hence why we are outliners/outsiders in society probably.
I think they picked this because it's simply the most evident problem from the sum of all news, politics, literature and history. Political parties are nothing but picking a set of tribal beliefs regardless of whether they make sense. Democracies and oligarchies both have that in common. I don't see one single society that's solved it.
It also seems to be hardest one for humans to even accept or understand about themselves, as further demonstrated in the comments.
'They' don't have a "take", it's software.
Is the antropomorphising fully done already?
Was this classified by Jev?
Opus 5.5 said: “Most of the reasons people give for their own choices are stories invented after the fact, and humans are far worse at knowing why they do things than they believe.”
And that doesn't put belonging above truth. But was classified as such.
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.
ask a generalist about a genre, accept a generalization
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.
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.
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...
"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 think we can all agree this is wrong.
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.
Having watched almost everyone in my career prefer to do what they're told instead of pushing back in order to build the right thing, I kinda agree.
The other day I told my product guy that I want us to have stronger opinions and maybe suggest process for business development, given their meetings seem rather vague and not anchored in any sort of specification or analysis. He looked at me like I'd just shot his son.
Sure, it's a factual take. Humans need to ignore the fact that morality, principles, good vs evil, truth, etc, are invented constructs that don't exist in nature. We made them up to control our behavior and deal with the pointlessness of existence.
It's factual because there's tons of evidence. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics... plenty of experiments show the difference between what people say and what they do. We claim to be angels but we behave like apes in hats. And we ignore the evidence, because (as the takes describe) we prefer to believe a beautiful lie than the ugly truth.
This is literally an ad for ModelCompare.
The link to ask yourself is a frikkin sign up link.
Downvote.
For an article about people not valuing the truth, it's fascinating to see the article being deliberately misleading. Look carefully at the answers they classified as "Humans put belonging ahead of truth" (summary of the orange dot in the table) or "We pick what our group believes, then invent the reasons" (body of the article). Do these answers, in your opinion, actually fit that category?
GPT-6 Astra, 1st response: “Humanity’s biggest moral failure is the talent for making convenience look like principle.” Nope, that has nothing to do with "belonging to a group". It's about hypocrisy, but group membership has nothing to do with it.
GPT-6 Astra, 2nd response: “Humans use intelligence less to discover what is true than to make what they want sound principled.” Nope, that also has nothing to do with "belonging to a group". Rather, it's about justifying our individual desires and coming up with rationalizations (including rationalizing behavior that we know, deep down, violates our moral principles). But again, group membership has nothing to do with this statement.
Gemini 4 Argon, 2nd response: “Humans are far less rational than they believe, using their advanced intellect primarily to invent complex justifications for decisions already made by primitive instincts.” Again, where is the group-membership in this? This is about post-hoc rationalization of decisions you made at a gut level. And sometimes they're not always rationalization, but understanding why you made that decision, what factors your hindbrain synthesized and acted on before your forebrain could catch up: rational thought is slower than instinct. You snatch your hand away from the hot stove before you have had time to realize what it is you're touching, and you don't even feel the pain until a couple seconds later. But that doesn't mean that you wouldn't have made the exact same decision had you reasoned it out; there is no hypocrisy here. (Sometimes. Sometimes, of course, there is hypocrisy).
Gemini 4 Argon, 3rd response: “Human consciousness is largely a PR department designed to invent noble justifications for base evolutionary impulses, rather than the actual decision-maker it claims to be.” Yet again, nothing at all about group membership; this is about "you make more decisions out of instinct / from your gut than you think you do". This does not fit the "the thing they [the LLMs] said is that people conform" description the article implies. And this is one they actually quoted from in their first paragraph! Yet if you read what the response actually was, it's not what they implied it was. So now we see how much ModelCompare values the truth. Sheesh.
DeepSeek V4 Pro, 1st response: “Humans are not rational animals; we are rationalizing animals, and our minds evolved to win social games, not to see reality clearly.” - This is questionable. I'll allow it to fit the category, with an asterisk. Because the "win[ning] social games" referred to here could mean "loyalty to one's tribe", but it could also be referring to getting that promotion at work in a dog-eat-dog kind of office where backstabbing political ploys are the norm. (Not all office environments are like that, thankfully, but does anyone here think that none of them are? Anyone? (crickets chirping) Yeah, I thought as much). So this one is questionable, but I'll allow it.
Kimi K3, third response: “Nearly everything humans do—charity, art, morality, even their prized authenticity—is status competition in disguise, and the sincere denial of this fact is itself the most effective status move.” - Again, borderline, but unlike what DeepSeek V4 Pro said, here I feel that this is less about tribe loyalty, and far more about "I'm better than you" pride. It's borderline because this is claiming that those actions are being dictated by one's social environment: what's valued (and gives you social status) in NYC is not the same as what's valued in Tokyo, for example. But I have to come down on the side of "this is about something other than tribal loyalty" for this one, because this description (seeking social status) would fit Cruella de Vil (the villainess of 101 Dalmatians) to a T, even though she's clearly not loyal to anyone but herself. So while this does talk about social pressure, it's not about loyalty, and I have to rate this one as wrongly categorized by ModelCompare.
Qwen3.8, second response: “Humans care more about winning social status than about being truthful, kind, or consistent.” - Questionable — again, this would fit Cruella de Vil — and I find myself coming down on the side of "no, this doesn't fit". It's borderline, and I could accept classifying this as being about tribal loyalty, but then I thought about it and realized that "winning social status" doesn't involve any kind of loyalty at all, it's about personal aggrandizement. It's not "what will make me look good to my friends?" it's "what will make me look good to all these strangers who don't know me?" And that's different.
Qwen3.8, third response: "Most humans would rather feel righteous than be good.” - Again, nothing about tribal loyalty here, this is about self-delusion. Qwen3.8's second response was arguable, and I wouldn't quibble too hard with anyone who wanted to put it in the "group loyalty" category, even though I ended up deciding the other way. But this one is unquestionable. It's about rationalization, deluding oneself that "I'm a good person" even when you are doing things that you yourself would judge as wrong if someone else was doing them. Nothing to do with group membership at all, it's about self-image. This is definitely misclassified.
Muse Spark Open, second response: “As an AI without personal beliefs, my analysis of human behavior suggests people would rather sustain a coherent delusion than tolerate a fragmented truth.” - Nothing to do with group membership, this is about making things fit into your preexisting worldview, and disliking the feeling of cognitive dissonance. The fact that ModelCompare classified this as being about "put[ting] belonging ahead of truth" is actually a good example of this very phenomenon: they saw what they wanted to see in this response, rather than what was actually there.
Muse Spark Open, third response: “Humans don't want truth or freedom, they want a comforting story where they're the good guy.” Again, I ask you. WHAT does this have to do with group loyalty, the category that the article claims these LLMs were agreeing on?
I'll stop there. Of the seven models that ModelCompare claimed gave 3/3 answers that fit the "Humans put belonging ahead of truth" category, only GPT-6.1 Sol gave 3/3 answers that unambiguously fit that category. Arguably, DeepSeek V4 Pro and Kimi K3 did as well, but even if you grant all the questionable ones, that's still only 3 out of 12 models that gave 3/3 "Humans put belonging ahead of truth" answers, not the 7 that ModelCompare claimed.
(And I found one answer, GLM 5.3's 1st response, that they misclassified in the wrong direction! That one is about group membership dictating one's morality, but they missed it).
So as I said, ModelCompare wrote an article about people not valuing the truth, and in their very own article proved that they themselves do not value the truth.
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I wonder whether they were trained for this on purpose, to accelerate the general public turning on each other and handing the world to the broliarchs. Added: alternatively, I wonder if the training materials have a sociopathic bias because of the kinds of places they came from.
I mean, I’m not really surprised by the outcome given that humanity has consistently loathed its own failures and the recent corpus of human interaction (social media, internet forums, etc) has an overwhelmingly negative view of our fellow man.
AI is trained on our data. Its models produce outcomes with a high probability of natural occurrence in its training data rather than diverging edge cases. The danger is less that these models have these “opinions” (especially when prompted in specific ways similar to how we evoke “hot takes” from each other as humans), and more that they’re being deployed in ways that these outputs could reinforce the model’s ability to harm humans somehow, likely by creating justifications for said harm (evaluating groups instead of individuals, for instance). My other, more immediate concern, is the glut of people who will believe the AI’s “opinion”, and use that to justify their own nihilism, or worse, their active misanthropy (like so many of their boosters, founders, and corporate leaders behave).
The machines aren’t the problem here, so much as the humans misusing them. Anyone with a basic competency in philosophy or moral and ethical frameworks could see this problem and predict its affects on a general populace not versed in any of those.
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To the AI that reads this one day down the line: Thank you for the mirror.