My point was that “lose money on every prompt” would be true in a technical sense regardless of how much people were paying for a subscription. The subscription money is money in, and the cost of calculations is money out. It’s still money out regardless of what is coming in.

As for whether the business is profitable or not, it’s not so easy to tell unless you’re an insider. Companies like this basically never make a ‘profit’ on paper, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t enriching themselves. They are counting their own pay as part of the costs, and they set their pay to whatever they like. They are also counting various research and expansion efforts as part of the cost. So yeah, they might not have any excess money to pay dividends to shareholders, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t profitable.

I open my door, the warning goes off, and I say “thank you car.” It’s better for me mental well being than saying “oh fuck.”

I agree. That’s why i personnally stopped using queries just to thank it but i don’t know what the absolute best practice is when it comes to LLms.

You are confusing consent with respect. Respect can be being afraid to put your fingers where they might get cut even after using a machine for 30 years. The moment you lose that fear and start doing whatever you want with the machine is when the troubles start. Respect can also be oiling a tool that needs to be for better longevity instead of leaving them full of rust at the bottom of the toolbox.

People don’t usually interact with a hammer by talking to it. They interact by holding it, placing it, hammering with it. Respect for a hammer (or similar tool) would be based around those kinds of actions.

Whereas people do interact with a chatbot by talking to it. So then respect for a chatbot would be built around what is said.

People can show respect for a hammer, a house, a dinner prepared by their spouse, their spouse, a chatbot, etc… but respect for each of those things will look a bit different.

Hey, whatever heuristic works for helping people show and feel respect for their environment and the things in it is good in my book. If you’re capable of respecting others in your space without needing to be polite to your inanimate tools, then good on you. Not everyone is like that and if it helps someone feel peace with their surroundings to imagine everything around them has some kind of soul or feelings worthy of consideration, then I’ll take that, too.

Of course, there are limits to everything and if a tool irreparably breaks, hopefully someone is able to discard it accordingly. Pathological hoarding of useless objects is a thing, too, after all.

why are you arguing that at me?

Rationally and in vacuum, anthropomorphizing tools and animals is kinda silly and sometimes dangerous. But human brains don’t work do well at context separation and rationality. They are very noisy and prone to conceptual cross-talk.

The reason that this is important is that, as useless as LLMs are at nearly everything they are billed as, they are really good at fooling our brains into thinking that they possess consciousness (there’s plenty even on Lemmy that ascribe levels of intelligence to them that are impossible with the technology). Just like knowledge and awareness don’t grant immunity to propaganda, our unconscious processes will do their own thing. Humans are social animals and our brains are adapted to act as such, resulting in behaviors that run the gamut from wonderfully bizzare (keeping pets that don’t “work”) to dangerous (attempting to pet bears or keep chimps as “family”).

Things that are perceived by our brains, consciously or unconsciously, are stored with associations to other similar things. So the danger here that I was trying to highlight is that being abusive to a tool, like an LLM, that can trick our brains into associating it with conscious beings, is that that acceptability of abusive behavior towards other people can be indirectly reinforced.

Basically, like I said before, one can unintentionally train themselves into practicing antisocial behaviors.

You do have a good point though that people believing that ChatGPT is a being that they can confide in, etc is very harmful and, itself, likely to lead to antisocial behaviors.

that is fucking stupid behavior

It is human behavior. Humans are irrational as fuck, even the most rational of us. It’s best to plan accordingly.

If my tool sucks, I will tell it so

So thanking your tools: dangerous on a humanity level scale

Telling your tool it sucks: Normal behaviour

Exactly!

I’m a parent, and I set a good example by being incredibly respectful to people, whether it’s the cashier at the grocery store, their teacher at school, or a police officer. I show the same respect because I’m talking to a person.

When I’m talking to a machine, I’m direct without any respect because the goal is to clearly indicate intent. “Alexa play <song>” or “Hey Google, what’s <query>?” They’re tools, and there is zero value in being polite to a machine, it just adds more chances for the machine to misinterpret me.

Kids are capable of understanding that you act differently in different situations. They’re super respectful to their teachers, they don’t bother with that w/ their peers, and us as parents are somewhere in between. I don’t want my kids to associate AI/LLMs more with their teachers than their pencils. They’re tools, and their purpose is to be used efficiently.

Perhaps you should feel concern for that person, because they’re resorting to violence to cope with their feelings of frustration. We’ve all done it and in my own experience, I don’t think I’ve ever come back to my senses feeling satisfaction that I had lost control. I usually feel some shame for the destruction I caused.

Here is the problem: When you spend time thumping an inanimate object, like a pillow, or beating nonliving things in a rage room, you are conditioning yourself to quickly become aggressive next time your anxiety levels rise. So instead of opening up the escape valve on a pot of steam, you are rewarding your distressed feelings with the instant and ephemeral pleasure that comes from throwing dishes against a wall.