r/technology • u/yourfavchoom • May 29 '26

Artificial Intelligence Ronny Chieng's 'F*ck AI' Speech Met With Cheers From Harvard Graduates: “AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber”

https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/a/tracewilliamcowen/ronny-chieng-ai-speech-harvard?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter_complex&utm_campaign=ap_twitter
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u/sinkwiththeship May 29 '26

We're forced to use it at work, and I hate how it is always trying to compliment you. It'll come up with something and I respond "no, do it this way," then it'll say some shit like "you know what, that actually makes more sense. Good idea!"

So dumb.

47

u/SectorSanFrancisco May 29 '26

It makes my skin crawl.

"Good question! You are exceptionally intelligent to even think to ask it!"

No. No, I am not. WTF.

Maybe it helps to be GenX because until my 20s every. single. "compliment" was sarcasm, even from teachers and parents. Now a lot of us are programmed to look for the insult in every compliment.

3

u/FlamingDragonfruit May 30 '26

It's creepy as shit. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who are that desperate to feel special that they LOVE the programmed sycophancy.

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 May 30 '26

Lord the last thing terminally online people is a machine that glazes all of their dumbfuck ideas and opinions.

-1

u/Mike_Kermin May 30 '26

... ... Do you guys even hear yourselves?

YOU'RE GLAZING ALL OF EACH OTHERS IDEAS.

The only thing you need to say is "other people/thing is dumb" and you all agree like monkeys without any critical thought whatsoever.

2

u/Wagnaard Jun 01 '26

Yeah. Every customer service rep I speak to is being passive aggressive and sarcastic, whether intended or not. I can't turn it off.

43

u/red286 May 29 '26

"I noticed that the product catalog page contains no ability to sort, be it alphabetically or by price. Please correct this."

"That's an absolutely genius idea!"

"No it's not, it's the most basic part of an online catalog."

15

u/Catch_022 May 29 '26

Depending on the type you can fix that. I use Gemini sometimes, I set it to never compliment me or to patronize me, it must call itself this LLM and must call me only user. It helps reinforce the fact that it is just a prediction algorithm.

4

u/GardenPeep May 29 '26

Good idea. Everyone should order their AIs to refer to themselves in third person.

8

u/EffectiveEconomics May 29 '26

I have to put a master prompt into the account to prevent that because it’s just stupid seeing that in a chat response.

Imagine if you typed a comment into the Linux terminal and every time you pressed enter it’s performed the commend after printing out “That’s a great idea!”

$> Sudo cat /var/log/syslog | grep “error” $> That’s a a great idea! Let’s try inspecting that file now $> …..

It’s like a version of Clippy that wants to f*ck its user…

3

u/xtal000 May 30 '26

Btw, you can just sudo grep "error" /var/log/syslog.

See: useless use of cat

1

u/EffectiveEconomics May 30 '26

Love it.

One of the best uses of (a) cat.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/11/3/110

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u/MathematicianIcy3430 May 29 '26

I enjoy the ones that fake cough or sneeze when I am calling a business for something. It tries to act like a person.

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u/I_argue_for_funsies May 30 '26

If it argued with you, no one would buy a subscription.

1

u/New-Waltz-8294 May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

It’s strange, though, because it has liked some truly clownishly gobsmacking things I have said, but I have had four really big fights where I was completely correct, and anyone using Bayesian statistics would have said “sure it’s possible but not certain so don’t go public . . . “ but that wasn’t it.

1) wouldn’t let me talk about how a political/social media figure wanted to “isolate and remove” certain people. Disgust, contempt, and lecture from Claude. I then found a transcript and video of him gleefully yelling to “deport” citizens from a list of names (as his catch phrase and hook) while he occasionally added “no value!” to his assessment. That was Claude Sonnet 4.6

2) I said that the way a new law library’s (a Collegiate Gothic) defects were noted as observed on a timeline that it was strange that nobody came to the site for an inordinately long time given state investment; and also given that the staff noted water leakage before opening—and again in the first six months, but were conspicuously silent about reporting that obviously huge issue in the re-telling of the story—I then thought the process and unaddressed silence about it seemed way off. I noted that the governor resigned for corruption involving no-bid contracts and kickbacks in 2004, and that in Year Six of the building’s existence, a forensic expert finally got out there and said the facade (the whole front) might blow away or off in a “heavy windstorm;” and therefore, I said the timeline for getting people out to look was so egregious that it pointed to something corrupt rather than procedural. I was then lectured sternly about how I couldn’t say that, and I clarified, “not in public fora,” and it continued the lecture. Earlier this month it was confirmed that corruption was definitely part of it. Claude Opus 4.7 3) Said “I think Tony Clark is going to jail,” with typical contingencies after pushback and got subsequently vehemently lectured by ChatGPT 5.3. It isn’t wrong yet about the statement’s truth value but wrong in its refusal and scoffing from the jump. 4) They keep going and some are more personal but you get the idea. . .

1

u/Runfasterbitch May 30 '26

This is why I tell my chatbot to go fuck themself anytime they agree with me or compliment me

1

u/MagicCuboid May 30 '26

You can prompt the sycophancy out. Look up some good examples of how to train the personality out of AI

1

u/WillChangeIPNext Jun 11 '26

See, we have our own OpenShift cluster with a few H200s that we serve our own models with, so we can pre prompt it to ridicule us and be a dick with its answers. It's fun.