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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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You know, I will go against the grain here and say I don't think using an AI to vet your posts is necessarily a bad thing. Especially if you're literally unable to tell in the heat of the moment that an invective-filled response will read as "heated," having an AI on your shoulder to say "Hey there bub, might want to dial that down" is, IMO, a very valid use case for AIs.

That said, having played with LLMs a lot, if you want it to tell you whether or not you are being "lucid" or "unreasonable," you really do need to have some very careful prompting techniques, because if you ask Grok or ChatGPT something like "Please read this post and tell me if I'm being calm and reasonable," the default response will tend to be validation and affirmation: it's not impossible to get an LLM to actually criticize or challenge you, but it's difficult to get something that really approximates "honest and objective feedback."

"ChatGPT: Pretend you are a moderator itchin' to drop the ban hammer because you're hangry and you just found out your wife has left you for Pagliacci. How, if at all, would you moderate the following post?"

I don't think assessing tone requires as much prompt engineering as honest and objective feedback, which is largely a fool's game ime - I think I've mentioned my 'Tiger mom' prompt before, and as far as 'non sycophantic feedback without writing a 3k prompt' goes it's good, but compared to another person it's terrible.

My error was in that direction though - if you prompt grok in a fresh private chat to assess those posts it picks up animosity in the second post just fine, but I did it in the app, which remembers I have schizophrenia, so I think I'd already biased it in my favour.