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bertillast Tuesday at 7:38 PM5 repliesview on HN

The urge to put capitalized, repetitive, borderline abusive instructions should be studied. I haven't read many academic papers looking at the frustrations around repetitive patterns.


Replies

reactordevlast Tuesday at 7:51 PM

There have been a few studies that have shown models produce worst responses when under duress from a frustrated user posting insults in all caps.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10144

notnautlast Tuesday at 8:00 PM

It reminds me of FIRMLY telling my cat to stop jumping up on the counter

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saligneyesterday at 4:33 AM

Yeah says way more about the user than the model

LordDragonfanglast Tuesday at 7:52 PM

It's fundamentally because, despite (nearly) everyone's claims otherwise, the fact that we interact with them through language means we (our brains) model them as a sort of person. (Note that this fact is totally orthogonal as to whether it's actually sentient or not.) We then try and instruct them the same way we would a person totally subordinate to us.

When a "person" that you don't view as a "real" person repeatedly does exactly what you just told it not to do (often amid false assurances it understands and will avoid doing so in the future), most people get angry.

Compare it to how the kind of people who treat children like property treat their kids, or other examples of keeping people as property.

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ur-whalelast Tuesday at 7:55 PM

> borderline abusive instructions

who, or rather what, is being abused here exactly ?

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