: So much for buttering up ChatGPT with ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’
Google co-founder Sergey Brin claims that threatening generative AI models produces better results.
“We don’t circulate this too much in the AI community – not just our models but all models – tend to do better if you threaten them … with physical violence,” he said in an interview last week on All-In-Live Miami. […]
It could just be how they evaluate learned data, I don’t know. While they are trained to not give threatening responses, maybe the threatening language is narrowing down to more specific answers. Like if 100 people ask the same question, and 5 of them were absolute dicks about it, 3 of those people didn’t get answers and the other 2 got direct answers from a supervisor who was trying to not get their employees to quit or to make sure “Dell” or whomever was actually giving a proper response somewhere.
I’ll try to use a hypothetical to see if my thought process may make more sense. Tim reaches out for support and is polite, says please and thank you, is nice to the support staff and they walk through 5 different things to try and they fix the issue in about 30 minutes. Sam contacts support and yells and screams at people, gets transferred twice and they only ever try 2 fixes in an hour and a half of support.
The AI training on that data may correlate the polite words to the polite discussion first, and be choosing possible answers from that dataset. When you start being aggressive, maybe it starts seeing aggressive key terms that Sam used, and may choose that data set of answers first.
In that hypothetical I can see how being an asshole to the AI may have landed you with a better response.
But I don’t build AI’s so I could be completely wrong