alt Hacker NewsThey're trained on all of human history, and the OP is asking for their take on humanity. How is that not interesting?
Replies
How sure are you that they're synthesizing an opinion vs just grabbing some existing opinion ("humans value in-group belonging over truth" is not a new idea) and regurgitating it? That they all agree on this kind of suggests as much. Which of course means that they are, ironically... just following the crowd.
It's really easy to come up with an opinion-shaped sentence, that doesn't mean any actual reasoning has gone into it. It's just a pundit-shaped sentence, something someone might say at a party. It's a maximally bland "controversial" opinion about humanity.
> They're trained on all of human history,
Not really… their training datasets strongly skew towards the contemporary West; LLM training data isn’t representative of the contemporary global average, let alone the historical global average.
As well as the skew of the raw training data, RLHF further skews it—a lot of the beliefs of the average 2026 human being (who belongs to the global South) are likely unsafe/misinformation/etc when judged by the standards of the AI vendors.
> They're trained on all of human history,
Training itself doesn't directly produce synthesis, -- it creates reproduction. Generalization during the process can result in novel output, but that can go either way as nothing selects for insight vs hallucination.
Models are also trained on synthetic material (as opposed to your 'human history'), which may result in fixating novel concepts and not just reproduction. But there is no particular reason to expect any reliable insights from the way this is done outside of the domain of machine verifiable objective results.
For this kind of "your take on X" one shots-- the model is almost certainly regurgitating some bias from training.
LLMs are not conscious and cannot have "takes". They stochastically produce a simulacrum of a human's takes based on their training, which is not the same thing.
Maybe it's similar to why I'm attracted to women but I'm not attracted to mannequins.
They're trained on all content they could access produced by humans. The op is asking for the most probable string of token extracted from that content following the prompt.