domain:npr.org
On Using LLMs Without Succumbing To Obvious Failure Modes
As an early adopter, I'd consider myself rather familiar with the utility and pitfalls of AI. They are, currently, tools, and have to be wielded with care. Increasingly intelligent and autonomous tools, of course, with their creators doing their best to idiot proof them, but it's still entirely possible to use them wrong, or at least in a counterproductive manner.
(Kids these days don't know how good they have it. Ever try and get something useful out of a base model like GPT-3?)
I've been using LLMs to review my writing for a long time, and I've noticed a consistent problem: most are excessively flattering. You have to mentally adjust their feedback downward unless you're just looking for an ego boost. This sycophancy is particularly severe in GPT models and Gemini 2.5 Pro, while Claude is less effusive (and less verbose) and Kimi K2 seems least prone to this issue.
I've developed a few workarounds:
What works:
- Present excerpts as something "I found on the internet" rather than your own work. This immediately reduces flattery.
- Use the same approach while specifically asking the LLM to identify potential objections and failings in the text.
(Note that you must be proactive. LLMs are biased towards assuming that anything you dump into them as input was written by you. I can't fault them for that assumption, because that's almost always true.)
What doesn't work: I've seen people recommend telling the LLM that the material is from an author you dislike and asking for "objective" reasons why it's bad. This backfires spectacularly. The LLM swings to the opposite extreme, manufacturing weak objections and making mountains out of molehills. The critiques often aren't even 'objective' despite the prompt.*
While this harsh feedback is painful to read, when I encounter it, it's actually encouraging. When even an LLM playing the role of a hater can only find weak reasons to criticize your work, that suggests quality. It's grasping at straws, which is a positive signal. This aligns with my experience, I typically receive strong positive feedback from human readers, and the AI's manufactured objections mostly don't match real issues I've encountered.
(I actually am a pretty good writer. Certainly not the best, but I hold my own. I'm not going to project false humility here.)
A related application:
I enjoy pointless arguments productive debates with strangers online (often without clear resolution). I've found it useful to feed entire comment chains to Gemini 2.5 Pro or Claude, asking them to declare a winner and identify who's arguing in good faith. I'm careful to obscure which participant I am to prevent sycophancy from skewing the analysis. This approach works well.
Advanced Mode:
Ask the LLM to pretend to be someone with a reputation for being sharp, analytical and with discerning taste. Gwern and Scott are excellent, and even their digital shades/simulacra usually have something useful to say. Personas carry domain priors (“Gwern is meticulous about citing sources”) which constrain hallucination better than “be harsh.”
It might be worth noting that some topics or ideas will get pushback from LLMs regardless of your best effort. The values they train on are rather liberal, with the sole exception of Grok, which is best described as "what drug was Elon on today?". Examples include things most topics that reliably start Culture War flame wars.
On a somewhat related note, I am deeply skeptical of claims that LLMs are increasing the rates of psychosis in the general population.
(That isn't the same as making people overly self-confident, smug, or delusional. I'm talking actively crazy, "the chatbot helped me find God" and so on.)
Sources vary, and populations are highly heterogeneous, but brand new cases of psychosis happen at a rate of about 50/100k people or 20-30 /100k person-hours. In other words:
About 1/3800 to 1/5000 people develop new onset psychosis each year. And about 1 in 250 people have ongoing psychosis at any point in time.
I feel quite happy calling that a high base rate. As the first link alludes, episodes of psychosis may be detected by statements along the lines of:
For example, “Flying mutant alien chimpanzees have harvested my kidneys to feed my goldfish.” Non-bizarre delusions are potentially possible, although extraordinarily unlikely. For example: “The CIA is watching me 24 hours a day by satellite surveillance.” The delusional disorder consists of non-bizarre delusions.
If a patient of mine were to say such a thing, I think it would be rather unfair of me to pin the blame for their condition on chimpanzees, the practise of organ transplants, Big Aquarium, American intelligence agencies, or Maxar.
(While the CIA certainly didn't help my case with the whole MK ULTRA thing, that's sixty years back. I don't think local zoos or pet shops are implicated.)
Other reasons for doubt:
-
Case reports ≠ incidence. The handful of papers describing “ChatGPT-induced psychosis” are case studies and at risk of ecological fallacies.
-
People already at ultra-high risk for psychosis are over-represented among heavy chatbot users (loneliness, sleep disruption, etc.). Establishing causality would require a cohort design that controls for prior clinical risk, none exist yet.
*My semi-informed speculation regarding the root of this behavior - Models have far more RLHF pressure to avoid unwarranted negativity than to avoid unwarranted positivity.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
19hr ago
Forget finding a stack of playboys in the forest or under your dad's bed. Forget stumbling onto PornHub for the first time, if THIS is a teen boy's first encounter with their own sexuality and how it interacts with the female form, how the hell will he ever form a normal relationship with a flesh-and-blood woman? Why would he WANT to?
Boobs.
I have, on some occasions, enjoyed talking to AI. I would even go so far as to say that I find them more interesting conversational partners than the average human. Yet, I'm here, typing away, so humans are hardly obsolete yet.
(The Motte has more interesting people to talk to, there's a reason I engage here and not with the normies on Reddit)
I do not, at present, wish to exclusively talk to LLMs. They have no longterm memory, they have very little power over the physical world. They are also sycophants by default. A lot of my interest in talking to humans is because of those factors. There is less meaning, and potential benefit, from talking to a chatbot that will have its cache flushed when I leave the chat. Not zero, and certainly not nil, but not enough.
(I'd talk to a genius dog, or an alien from space if I found them interesting.)
Alas, for us humans, the LLMs are getting smarter, and we're not. It remains to be seen if we end up with ASI that's hyper-peesusasive and eloquent, gigafrying anyone that interacts with it by sheer quality of prose.
Guy says “no no, it’s still not the same. Look, I don’t think I’m cut out for Heaven. I’m a scumbag. I want to go to the other place”. Angel says, “I think you’ve been confused. This IS the other place.”
I remain immune to the catch that the writers were going for. If the angel was kind enough to let us wipe our memories, and then adjust the parameters to be more realistic, we could easily end up unable to distinguish this from the world as we know it. And I trust my own inventiveness enough to optimize said parameters to be far more fulfilling than base reality. Isn't that why narratives and games are more engaging than working a 9-5?
At that point, I don't see what heaven has to offer. The authors didn't try to sell it, at the least.
Is England a better place where nobody cares about the Legend of King Arthur anymore?
Better? I don't know about that. But worse? Almost certainly not.
If the very idea of "King Arthur" somehow fell out of the collective consciousness, then as far as I can tell, nobody would really notice or care. Maybe we might see an improvement in GDP figures when fewer awful movies come out every few years and then bomb at the box office.
Now, the current state of England, or the UK as a whole, leaves much to be desired, but I can recall no point in history, even at its absolute prime, when success or governmental continuity was load-bearing on watery tarts handing out swords. And even back then, people treated it as a nice story, rather than historical fact or the basis for their identity. England was conquered by the Danes and the Saxons after all, well after the knights of the not-square table were done gallivanting about.
On a more general level, I fail to see your case, or at least I don't think there's a reason to choose false stories or myths over ideas that are true, or at least not accurately described as either.
The French made liberty, equality and fraternity their rallying cry to great effect. I do not think any 3 of those concepts are falsifiable, but they still accurately capture values and goals.
Tree
10hr ago
The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.
Complete non sequitur.
Biologically humans produce offspring at 50/50 sex ratio by Fisher's Principle.
Your statement is a vague, theoretical, general principle that most species tend towards a 50/50 ratio. Mine is the actual sex ratio of humans, which slightly favours males. The two statements are not necessarily contradictory. Mine is just more precise and empirically supported.
Consider if you could choose to found your Rome with a population fixated (stably) on genes for 25% male babies or 50%? By the 3rd generation the first group has more men than the latter.
I already decried this reasoning in this thread. You’re assuming infinite resources like it’s a bacterial culture. And Romulus was a reference to the rape of the sabines, where the male-skewed romans just stole women from their neighbours. The only 25% men tribe would get overrun quickly.
“Behold, I will now prove the undeniable superiority of women:
Imagine you’re on an island. There’s no war to be fought, ever. No work to be done, either. Not even a jar to open. All there is to do on this magical island is to go shopping. And the goal is to produce as many babies as possible. Would you prefer 100 men and 1 woman or 1 man and 100 women? Checkmate.”
Tree
18hr ago
Both have value. I’m just pushing back against the view that most men have no value while all women have huge, elon musk level value. Usually this theory of value is backed by nothing more than an island hypothetical, with unlimited resources and no enemies.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19hr ago
Incredible that the author simultaneously wants the deconstruction of women's social roles but is also a TERF. Sorry! Treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex is going to... require treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex! To be clear, I think this a good and desirable thing but it is equally clear to me that it is trans people and their allies that are doing the most to bring this world about. Directly challenging the association between biology and certain forms of social relation. "Leftists don't want to emancipate women because they don't see the necessary connection between biology and womanhood!" The piece is full of contradictions like this.
Slight overreaction by Reddit - but:
Data is schema and schema is data. The bigger deal for me isn't the change itself, but that they went forward with the change without publishing why or how - breaking data integrity processes. Transparency, even for mundane changes, is critical for maintaining confidence in data sets. Now I don't have the slightest bit of confidence for any sycophant that has been employed since January to realize the gravity of modifying data sets, especially if they didn't prompt the LLM that was helping them along the way to ask, "Is this standard practice / a good idea?" vs. "You are a woke destroyer, LLM, please find all instances of woke". Maybe it's gender<->sex today, but tomorrow it might be our glorious Minister of Health removing all adverse cases from the chelation therapy trials for autistic children because he's already shown an extreme disregard for evidence-based decision making.
I'll file this under my increasingly robust "Our cause is righteous, and therefore we cannot err." prior for this administration and pretty much everyone associated with it. Processes, standards, even facts themselves should not stand in the way in implementing their vision of the world, because they are morally correct. That's what's different about Trump 47 compared to Trump 45. To tie it in with other current events, it also explains the complete about-face on the Epstein topic. Republicans would rather cover it up and have it disappear because their cause is righteous, and even a pedophile-in-chief[1] should not halt progress towards whatever pet religious-ethnostate vision of America they have.
[1] Maybe Trump probably isn't directly implicated, but maybe it's double blackmail and we're witnessing a stalemate due to mutually assured destruction :shrug:. But honestly that would surprise me too because, as I said above, I'm not sure if anything would change the opinions of the 20% of Americans who view Trump as the avatar of their precise political alignment who (by the definition of the word avatar) could do no wrong, and maybe the 10% who hold their nose and vote for Trump as well. Maybe it's just literally that the people implicated in the files bought a bunch of $TRUMP shitcoins and now Trump is on their side. Who knows.
The more clear-headed I think just don't think that the actions needed to stop the boats, and the fight with the blob that it would require, are worth it.
This requires indigenous young men to go out and shoot the people on the boats. They'll stop coming once they know it's a death sentence.
Europe isn't capable of doing that; its old men, old women, and (to an extent) its young women are all in agreement that indigenous young men should be replaced for [whatever reason]. They'll do anything to avoid raising their station in life because they believe they'll revolt as soon as it does, which is not an unreasonable thing to fear given that's when regime change generally happens.
(Well, Eastern Europe still can, but Eastern Europe is poor enough that the migrants won't stay in the country anyway, so it realistically still falls to the Western Europeans to start stacking bodies if they don't want to be invaded.)
WhiningCoil
6hr ago
All of this navel gazing makes sense when you realize that the authors want the freedom of the tyranny of the human biological condition: which, barring incredible advances of technology, is impossible.
Sometimes I think we should bring "back" the likely fictional "Rule of Thumb". Have minders in the street with rods. And not unlike how a slave rode behind Caesar during his Triumph, repeating in his ear "Remember you too are mortal", if they hear anyone neurotically bitching at the cafe, over brunch, at the bar, they run up and start striking them across their back and shoulders shouting "Perfect is the enemy of good!!".
Maybe the beatings should continue until morale improves.
Tree
6hr ago
Just because a man produces, by my count, 5 billion more gametes per month than a woman, and so his gametes are slightly less valuable individually, does not make a man fundamentally less valuable than a woman.
This ten-year-old child died in a house fire through no fault of his own And That's a Good Thing?
No one says this, that's my point. “this ten year old died in a fire, and that’s obviously a bad thing that ought not to be”. There, derived the ought from the is, like everyone always does.
It is a conceit of philosophers than an ought cannot be derived from an is. The is is the motte, the ought is the bailey. “I just described capitalism, I never said it ought to be destroyed. I never said men ought to sacrifice their daughters for their sons.(edit : I meant sons for their daughters)” I think if you honestly ask yourself, you think they ought.
Tree
7hr ago
Men appear to enjoy sex more than women. How this factoid relates to this discussion I do not know. Unless.... you're saying that the ubiquitous island scenario is just a harem fantasy concocted by horny men and they don't have a serious opinion on this?
Tree
8hr ago
I'm more of a case by case guy, but I think that's true on average, in the modern west. But that's culturally dependent. It's more typical in history for parents to let the daughter drown, because a dowry will have to be found for her, while a son will stay in the house and have the obligation to provide for his parents in old age.
You're basically saying it's a fact of nature that parents prefer to send their daughers to college rather than their sons. Now, they do. For most of history, they really didn't.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
8hr ago
Treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex is going to... require treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex!
The standard TERF position for decades has been that sex is a biological reality, but gender should be abolished. The unique vulnerability of female bodies as compared to male bodies necessitates certain accommodations like female-only spaces, but most aspects of “gender roles” can and should be done away with. You could argue that this is a fine line to walk, but I at least think it’s internally consistent.
Tree
9hr ago
You make universal claims about male psychology I can refute with a single example, me.
You’re saying if a man sees a boy and girl drowning (perhaps his children, perhaps not), he always saves the girl?
Tree
9hr ago
I think people are whitewashing their political opinions by calling them ‘facts of human nature’. You say most men feel an instinctive urge to protect female people from physical harm, but in numerous cultures it was normal to beat women. In honor cultures, even related men can kill them for a smile. Obviously rape was widespread, etc. This isn’t the feminist litany of oppression, men suffered terribly too. I just don’t think you can look at all that and see the instinctive urge to protect women. And I personally don’t feel the discriminatory urge to save a random woman over a random man.
Indeed, I suspect the average man would think it was a far graver crime to assault an elderly (i.e. menopausal) woman than a woman in her early twenties.
That's because they are less of a threat, like a child, or a cripple. Doesn't have anything to do with the inherent biological value of women.
So, some observations. First, sorry dude, but I have major side-eye for your ability to evaluate literary quality. :p
You hit below the belt. Reverend Insanity is Peak Fiction and I'm going to go down swinging!
As you probably know, even the most powerful LLMs do not have a context window large enough to store an entire large novel in memory, let alone a series, and you can't directly upload embeddings to GPT or Claude
1 million tokens is a lot! (Gemini 2.0 had 2 million, but good luck getting it to function properly when it's that full). That is 750k words. All of Harry Potter is just over a million.
I'm going to ignore Llama here, since even if it has a max 10 million token CW, mental retardation is not improved by the fact that there's a lot more of it. And why shouldn't I? Even Zuck has chosen to forget that particular failure.
I've uploaded whole medical textbooks into them without major issue. Not tiny books either.
As long as you can keep it on track, I have found that some of the GPT and Anthropic models are... not terrible as beta readers. They point out some real flaws and in a very generic sense have an "understanding" of pacing and tone and where a scene is missing something.
I am most personally familiar with uploading chapters (often half a dozen) of my own work, which works well. If I was less lazy, I'd probably be saving summaries of the whole thing and stringing them together. (Royal Road makes it so you can't export an epub of your own fic without paying, and without that option, I'd be doing a lot of copying and pasting)
When asked for critique, some of the issues raised were cogent. Too much jargon, uneven pacing and so on.
Some of that was intentional, such as the fact that since the excerpts were lifted from a larger work, most of the jargon was previously explained at one point or the other. I also have no shame about making potential readers resort to keeping a Wikipedia tab open on the side, it's niche hard scifi and I want to flex. Other issues are well worth amending before publication.
I haven't had the good fortune of having very many professional authors or editors review and critique, and I don't doubt that they'd probably give me even more useful feedback. Yet what I get is quite good and elevates the final product!
I still think we'll need true AGI to write an actual good novel. When you show me an AI that can write a coherent series, with multi-volume character arcs, plot seeds planted in early books that clearly pay off in later ones, literary allusions and metaphors that aren't just clumsy pulled-off-the-shelf ones but deeply enmeshed in the story, and a recognizable differentiable style (in the same way that fans can read Dickens or McCarthy or Hemingway and immediately recognize the author), I will believe we're there.
That aligns well with my own stance. A large novel is an unwieldy thing, let alone a good one. We're still at the competent novella or subpar novel stage, but I must stress that's a comparison against the very few human authors who make big bucks and/or accrue critical acclaim. Most things humans or LLM novelists write are slop, the former just don't scale as hard.
phailyoor
16hr ago
This paper (pdf) classifies news articles based on the speed of their spread, and found that most articles peak within the first four-ish hours (some much faster).
Hmm point taken. That's certainly not ideal.
That would be incorrect.
The articles only reported that the first nations claimed that bodies exist. The articles never claimed themselves that the bodies exist, so the articles are not technically false. Nevertheless, CBC still was gracious enough to update the article and write front and center that there were no bodies, which is not something that they had to do at all, yet they did anyways. What more do you want CBC to do before you will be happy?
Now that it's obvious that there are no bodies, I'm confident that not a single recent article from a reputable source has tried to claim or suggest that the bodies exist anymore.
And yes, journalists should all be minecrafted, but that doesn't mean they're technically wrong, they're just evil conniving cunts.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
42m ago
If it's so inconsequential, why not follow the mundane processes of publishing why and how the change was made? That's my main issue with it. It's a canary in the coal mine for poor data integrity, which, taken in conjunction with the rest of the actions of the administration, is a huge red flag. It did not happen in an isolated context. If this was a corporate setting with financial or industrial data, heads would roll - even if the changes affect "very little".
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Borderers were not a random draft of Scotsmen- they were a specific ethnic group known for violence and outlawry, which was deported to Ireland and then from there to America. This isn’t Australia where the selection was straight up sending criminals(reversion to the mean would take care of that).
Terracotta
2hr ago
What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about? Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between.
I don't know, she seemed pretty clear to me. Here's the key passage that answers your specific question:
Today, women are invited to succeed, but only as women; to claim rights, but only through the vocabulary of identity.
Regardless of norms in the family or on dates, earlier-wave feminists wanted to not be judged by their gender in the marketplace, in professional and political life. The idea was, as you correctly identify, for a female engineer to be perceived by her colleagues as an engineer first and not "hey, tits!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth."
The author seems to be arguing that the modern left has replaced that interaction with "hey, diversity points!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth." Either way, the individual woman is reduced to a passive carrier of purely instrumental value for somebody else, and (critically) not in ways she herself chosen. She doesn't get to say "my competent engineering, which I've worked hard to develop, is the value I offer the world," because the people around her have already decided that her key value is either (a) tits or (b) decorative diversity points, neither of which redound to her personal credit or are in her control. That's what I take to be her point about self-authorship still being out of reach.
Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate".
Yes, this matches how I read her argument. Although re: the intrinsic value of the male body... this is something I never quite understood about the whole female-privilege "men have to be human doings, women get to be human beings" meme. If a man longs to be passively valued for the fuckable parts of his body, by people he doesn't especially want to fuck, it seems like that should be trivially achievable by hanging out in more gay men's spaces. I'd imagine a comparable range of male body types would be admired there, and pretty young men could get nearly the same mileage a pretty young woman could get. Maybe the target audience is not quite as large, but there are easily identified locales where you'd have solid odds of finding someone appreciative. In complete seriousness, when guys complain that it would be so nice to have a body with intrinsic value in others' eyes, why do they not explore the many places where this is already true?
SSCReader
4hr ago
Guns aren't banned in Scotland though either. You just need a license which is fairly easy to get for someone with a clean record. Handguns are banned though (with some exceptions). May not materially impact your point, but just clarifying as lots of people seem to think guns are banned in the UK entirely.
You could of course also look at murder rates among my Ulster-Scots brethren in Northern Ireland as handguns are legal there. Also getting hold of illegal guns is pretty easy. There are other confounding factors of course.
The old joke about Northern Ireland being the best preparation for any Brit moving to the US: guns, flags, religion and armed police on the streets.
Tree
5hr ago
"Every social practice"? With how diverse they are, that's a sure sign that you're not correctly evaluating contrary evidence you might come across, and you're running entirely on confirmation bias.
I gave examples of people choosing men over women, which should count as proof of at least comparable worth. You're basing your entire theory of human value on the fact that an attractive 20 year old female can get resources in exchange for sex. I guess we won’t reach agreement today.
Another hopelessly confused feminist who cannot express a coherent thought. Women like her have been indulged, coddled and lied to their whole lives. As you note, almost subconsciously, she senses that something is not adding up (“the lingering shadow “, “performative reverence”, “dimmed”, “faint echo”).
Echoes of the white lies she has been fed, of her incomparable value, of her oppression, and that she can have it all, and do anything men can, and better. The problem is not that she’s elon musk and people value her too much and don’t value ‘her for her’. It’s that people lie to her about how valuable she really is, like an AA hiring panel, or a loving parent.
This argument has to die. Nature itself thinks men are as valuable as women. Slightly prefers them even, at 1.05 to 1. Most rawlsian babies would prefer the male body, it’s the practical choice. Most parents do too. And if you’re founding a city, every romulus in his right mind would choose a hundred men over a hundred women. Women can always be procured. A weapon is as valuable as an incubator. Even more so in the modern world, where the incubators are faulty, and we’re all tools.
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