Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Parrot is no longer a useful mental model. A parrot cannot make runs of logically consistent output, but new LLMs can.

They still lack intent/understanding. But a system does not need understanding for its output to consist of racially biased statements.

But let's also point out that GPT can also make very powerful anti racist statements. It can persuade people to be less biased against race. Reacting to the specific beliefs and points raised in the conversation. Generating sensible counter arguments.

In that way, GPT4 is better at refuting racist rhetoric than most people are.

So it's potential here is both good - its ability to help the fight against racism - and bad - its risk of generating racism.



Or how about we let our tools just be tools?

Shoehorning "anti racist" messaging into the tool makes it a substantially inferior tool.


It's not signalling. It's generating effective arguments against bias.

That makes it a more useful and powerful tool.


Well if a parrot called me a twat like that one, it may be logically consistent.

How do you know? Well that requires verification, which is probably more costly than doing the legwork yourself in the first place.

That applies to all LLM generated output. It is worthless until the reasoning is validated. Which is costly.


That same thing applies to the employees at your company. And you should be talking to it like it's a real employee, with the power to critique and improve your process and designs.

It can simulate a decent project or product manager, a requirements analyst, a test planner, a junior implementer, debugger, automation engineer, etc

If you can't make your engineering pipeline nicer with those kinds of roles, I think you would either struggle to direct a team of those same people IRL, or you're just not being candid and effective enough with your prompting. Read papers on promoting ideas like reflection, critique, tool use, etc. Really treat it like a valuable team member, and it will boost your product requirements, write great tests right out the gate, and many other things you will WISH you could get your human colleagues to do! And all for a tiny fraction of the cost of human specialists!


This is a hot take, but a lot of people can be parrots also.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: