Yet another Hacker News

16 points io84 2 hours ago 6 comments

Lerc 1 hour ago | parent

I think there's probably quite likely that the desired position for a chatbot on the conformity-contrarian axis is quite different from country to country.

The appropriate tone for a culture seems to be something that US companies are quite poor at. It really surprised me that after many many years of AI in fiction developing a de facto standard baseline of tone that they decided to start out with 'overly familiar cheerful'

I have wondered if the horrific Tiktok voice came from Chinese developers setting it to represent how Americans sound to them. Maybe it goes in both ways.

nomel 12 minutes ago | parent

Yes, I can't wait until our AI writes incorrect text just to save face, which is impossibly important in many cultures.

svnt 9 minutes ago | parent

Fable will already do this, just very subtly.

writeslowly 1 hour ago | parent

I was doing similar experiments but having a circle of models debate some particular topic to see if they'd arrive at a consensus or not, and I found that they would almost always arrive at an agreement, but Gemini was always the one that held a position outside of the group consensus.

That said, for something very simple like "What color should my room be" I'm not sure this is a desirable trait. The model that knows most people like cream (or whatever) is probably functioning more correctly than the one suggesting dayglo orange

io84 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting result - I wonder you were capturing consensus or agreeableness towards what the user (or in this case: a group chat of robots) is proposing. I think non-agreeableness can be a very valuable trait.

svnt 10 minutes ago | parent

Gemini has been like that. One early model I used I asked it about another company’s model. It insisted it didn’t exist. I told it when it was released and to search. It did, and found results, but told me it wasn’t really a public model and I couldn’t use it. I screenshotted the pricing page. It told me I got that from somewhere else, it couldn’t be correct, because it couldn’t access that page.

It is one thing to avoid sycophancy, but Gemini often seems to go well beyond that.