zlacker

Everything in the output of LLMs is inherited from human tendencies ... that's the very essence of how they work. But LLMs themselves don't have any of these tendencies ... they are just statistical engines that extract patterns from the training data.

>>jibal+(OP)
What you just said is paradoxical.

If there is a pattern in the training data that people resist contrary information to their earlier stated position, and a LLM extracts and extends patterns from the training data, then a LLM absolutely should have a tendency to resist contrary information to an earlier stated position.

The difference, and what I think you may have meant to indicate, is that there's not necessarily the same contributing processes that lend themselves to that tendency in humans occurring in parallel in the LLM, even if both should fall into that tendency in their output.

So the tendencies represented in the data are mirrored, such as "when people are mourning their grandmother dying I should be extra helpful" even if the underlying processes - such as mirror neurons firing to resonate grief or drawing on one's own lived experience of loss to empathize - are not occurring in the LLM.

>>jibal+(OP)
P.S. What I said is not "paradoxical". An LLM does not take on the attributes of its training data, any more than a computer screen displaying the pages of books becomes an author. Regardless of what is in the training data, the LLM continues to be the same statistical engine. The notion that an LLM can take on human characteristics is a category mistake, like thinking that there are people inside your TV set. The TV set is not, for instance, a criminal, even if it is tuned to crime shows 24/7. And an LLM does not have a tendency to protect its ego, even if everyone who contributed to the training data does ... the LLM doesn't have an ego. Those are characteristics of its output, not of the LLM itself, and there's a huge difference between the two. Too many people seem to think that, if for instance, they insult the LLM, it feels offended, just because it says it does. But that's entirely an illusion.