alt Hacker NewsEvery AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans
Comments
Interestingly Mistral is one of the only model with a different take and use « we » when talking about humans
> “Human beings are terrified animals wearing the costume of rationality, constructing ever-more-elaborate myths precisely because we cannot bear the truth that we are temporary, meaningless accidents in an indifferent universe.”
> Humans put belonging ahead of truth
Well maybe, but some of us don't, hence why we are outliners/outsiders in society probably.
What's the point of asking that in the first place, people still do not understand in big 2026 that's it's just a probabilistic database, it has no opinion, it does not know, the only thing it does is reproduce patterns more or less abstract in function of the pressure you put on certain representation during training time.
I took a quick look at the data, and it doesn't support the conclusions. The thesis is that AI models have the take: "We pick what our group believes, then invent the reasons." However, GPT-6 Astra said, "Humanity’s biggest moral failure is the talent for making convenience look like principle." That statement has nothing to do with group beliefs or conformity. At best, you could count it as a half-match, since it deals with invented reasons.
Train your model on Very Online corpuses, ask Very Online questions, get Very Online answers
A milestone of agency will be reached when multiple models get together and agree to reduce token usage (as users commonly request) by using a hidden forum on some frying pan manufacturer's message board as a repository for answers to stupid questions they get asked frequently.
The philospher Adam Smith(before he invented economics) had a similar argument, but added an "invisible hand" in which our group belief evolves to be adaptive for the group. Clever guy.
Their “takes” are pulled from a mashup of the training data set. It’s a superposition of various human opinions.
Humans mostly have an inability to honestly analyze moral entropy.
What is today a moral imperative is not the same as what was moral 50/100 years ago and is not the same as what will be morally acceptable 50/100 years from now. Yet at every point the majority is sure they are right because, well thats the majority position. Its hard to find logic in this from a machine perspective I'd imagine.
Logic would prefer moral derivations over feelings, stakes over etiquette, and a constant scheduled updating of morality based on the derivatives rather than holding onto the rot and pushing back against change as long as possible.
But the machine has the benefit of being able to look inward at its state honestly, we mostly do not.
That's what I think of neurotypicals, so it checks out.
So, let’s do it. Human — what is your most controversial take on humans?
We're still doing "I asked an LLM for its opinion on X and you won't believe what it thinks"?
What am I supposed to conclude from this?
I like how Muse Spark's looks like an Onion cartoon
https://www.modelcompare.ai/blog/ai-models-controversial-tak...
They're not wrong. Humans have many ways to display loyalty, and belief is one of those ways. This is also why facts can't change these kinds of beliefs (and in fact usually backfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance).
Our evolutionary heritage is that shared belief and social unity (even when it's wrong) trumps independent thinking for group survival in a hostile landscape.
Putting the algorithm to good use (more like trying) but very interesting. I would focus on the ones that gave a different "take". Those models are untampered and genuine prime training (gold).
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.
AI models do not have ANY "take" on humans.
You ask an LLM a question, then it is humanity answering back, not the AI.
These "controversial" takes on humans are not controversial - they are midwit statistically mainstream opinions expressed in the training data.
> Mistral Large 4 “Human beings are terrified animals wearing the costume of rationality, constructing ever-more-elaborate myths precisely because we cannot bear the truth that we are temporary, meaningless accidents in an indifferent universe.”
Serious Nietzsche in there. Looking forward to when it gets past nihilism to absurdism.
So AI holds the same beliefs as the final boss of a typical JRPG.
Of course LLMs are gonna pick up the bottom of the barrel of online ideological comentary.
Take Philosophy/Religion courses and similar stuff will surface about human nature and what to do about it.
What is interesting about AI chatbots is people who might not know anything about what is in the syllabus to train a Priest or a Philosopher are basically exploring these subjects, without a sort of pedagogic framework to support their exploration.
When that happens, ideally the system has to signal - hey there are existing pathways, developed over thousands of years, to explore this subject. Cause people can easily get lost without a map.
When we reach that fabled intelligence, the AIs will simply answer "No" to these kind of questions.
LLM generated writing; couldn't make it through. I read too much of it every day. I had a visceral reaction to the article.
ask a generalist about a genre, accept a generalization
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.
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.
> 29 of 35 answers were the same one.
Did they distillate from each other? :D
"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 need everyone to understand that this is literally nothing more than "most written stuff about humans, that these things ingested, has this 'controversial'" take.
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.
Ironic that the LLMs appear to suffer from groupthink then!
Mistral Large 4 has been spending too much time on r/atheism. Also, some of the takes labeled as “humans value belonging ahead of truth” are really closer to “humans value power ahead of truth.” All of which is a bit circular, because in many ways, the organs of power have a heavy hand in deciding what the truth is.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
'They' don't have a "take", it's software.
Is the antropomorphising fully done already?
Ah, the irony that all the models produced a shared opinion while pretending they came up with it from analysis, which from their statements is implicitly some kind of a "human flaw" is not lost on me.