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ben_wtoday at 5:57 PM2 repliesview on HN

Eventually, that becomes interesting. Before we get to that stage, I think we pass through (almost) everyone following almost the exact same advice as each other.

Such people are extremely predictable.

You may have already noticed, before LLMs, cliché? Talking points that make a group identifiable? Words and phrases that act as applause lights or cognitive stop signs? (That last sentence itself being a pair of clichés that you can use to identify where I hang out online).

Anyway, point is, LLMs will give us a memetic monoculture before they turn us all into a world of correctly personalised Whispering Earring wearers. That makes them predictable, that makes them exploitable. It'll be like playing chess against someone you know is using a specific version of Stockfish: even though it would beat you if you tried to fight the system unaided, you can win by asking your own copy of the AI to go one step further ahead, and it will be accurate precisely because it's playing against itself and reacting to its own moves.

(Of course, the fact I've said this in writing means this is in the training data; in the general case this means the LLMs will know that and account for that, but I suspect comments like this won't shift the needle all that much compared to the aggregate output of 3 billion people reacting to short-form emotional manipulation A/B slop)


Replies

csh0today at 6:23 PM

This is already underway.

My dog often gets misidentified as a restricted breed. This used to make apartment hunting difficult because, occasionally, the property manager would visually ID the dog breed as banned, I’d have to go to the vet and get paperwork, potentially gene testing, arguing she wasn't, it was a whole thing.

But, recently, the apartment I moved into had an online portal where I had to upload a photo and it would identify the breed to determine if it was approved.

I correctly assumed the portal was using an LLM for this purpose. I wrote a script which submitted different photos of my dog to the major LLM providers until it found a photo which all the LLMs would identify as the correct breed.

I simply submitted that photo and, as expected, passed with flying colors.

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sebastiennighttoday at 6:12 PM

> It'll be like playing chess against someone you know is using a specific version of Stockfish: even though it would beat you if you tried to fight the system unaided, you can win by asking your own copy of the AI to go one step further ahead, and it will be accurate precisely because it's playing against itself and reacting to its own moves.

I don't believe this is how chess works, and I don't believe this is how Stockfish works, and I don't believe this is how AI works.

Stockfish isn't winning because it's playing a better sequence of programmed steps, and having access to "the next version of Stockfish" doesn't mean it can "guess the next move" and play against that.

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