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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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So detective work? Anything a human can do, I do think an LLM can do. People are not that good at hiding who they are under scrutiny.

did you actually read that paragraph I wrote? I am feeding it pictures of these people, and asking it to come with personality archetypes based on their pictures alone, and then asking the LLM questions about how the person would approach real-life situations. The LLM even guessed which one in the friend group has experimented with polyamory. Note that I made sure to not feed any additional information except a simple picture with no obvious giveaways featured, all my friends look like the average simple adult and we all dress/present rather simply, nothing too flashy and no obvious personality trait leakage is present in our appearance, at least on the first glance. Most strangers would not be able to guess that the individual in question is into polyamorous dynamics, there is no obvious giveaway in their appearance, absolutely nothing that would align with the common stereotypes in media about poly-people, yet the LLM guessed accurately.

I did. And as I pointed out, unless you're like a detective, most people look at other people and don't notice anything. But clearly, detectives do. Investigators do. Police do. Researchers do. Scientists do. They are trained to pick up on details and infer information that normal people don't. And training meant written down and was probably part of LLM training data. So yes, I am not surprised that LLMs know things about people based purely on images.

and doesn't that induce a 1984-esque scare within you? it can accurately guess your opinion on pretty much every topic out there, taboo ones, political issues or even something as frivolous as opinions on pop-culture debates, all using a simple picture. I will be using this on Hinge-matches next

Think of what it will be able to do in 6 months to a years time. I do think there is something to the position of: "we already have AGI we just don't know it yet".

here though I am busy asking it some real dumbfuck questions like ''what do they think about body hair?'' or ''will xyz stay with their broke boyfriend?'' GPT has been surprisingly accurate with it's lens of perception, it said that xyz would indeed be loyal to their broke boyfriend during transitory periods but would not stay with someone who's default orientation is being a bum