alt Hacker NewsI’m not too worried about starting to write like a bot. But, I do notice that I’m sometimes blunt and demanding when I talk to a bot, and I’m worried that could leak through to my normal talking.
I try to be polite just to not gain bad habits. But, for example, chatGPT is extremely confident, often wrong, and very weasely about it, so it can be hard to be “nice” to it (especially knowing that under the hood it has no feelings). It can be annoying when you bounce the third idea off the thing and it confidently replies with wrong instructions.
Anyway, I’ve been less worried about running local models, mostly just because I’m running them CPU-only. The capacity is just so limited, they don’t enter the uncanny valley where they can become truly annoying.
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I think it makes much more sense to treat the bot like a bot and avoid humanizing it. I try to abstain from any kind of linguistic embellishments when prompting AI chat bots. So, instead of "what is the area of the circle" or "can you please tell me the area of the circle", I typically prefer "area of the circle" as the prompt. Granted, this is suboptimal given the irresponsible way it has been trained to pretend it's doing human-like communication, but I still try this style first and only go to more conversational language if required.
It's like using your turn signal even when you know there's nobody around you. Politeness is a habit you don't want to break.