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0 pointschasd003mo ago0 comments

I was listening to a podcast about people becoming obsessed and "in love" with an LLM like ChatGPT. Spouses were interviewed describing how mentally damaging it is to their partner and how their marriage/relationship is seriously at risk because of it. I couldn't believe no one has told these people to just goto the LLM and reset the context, that reverts the LLM back to a complete stranger. Granted that would be pretty devastating to the person in "the relationship" with the LLM since it wouldn't know them at all after that.

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jncfhnb3mo ago

It’s the majestic, corrupting glory of having a loyal cadre of empowering yes men normally only available to the rich and powerful, now available to the normies.

adamesque3mo ago

that's not quite what parent was talking about, which is — don't just use one giant long conversation. resetting "memories" is a totally different thing (which still might be valuable to do occasionally, if they still let you)

onraglanroad3mo ago

Actually, it's kind of the same. LLMs don't have a "new memory" system. They're like the guy from Memento. Context memory and long term from the training data. Can't make new memories from the context though.

(Not addressed to parent comment, but the inevitable others: Yes, this is an analogy, I don't need to hear another halfwit lecture on how LLMs don't really think or have memories. Thank you.)

dragonwriter3mo ago

Context memory arguably is new memory, but because we abused the metaphor of “learning” rather than something more like shaping inborn instinct for trained model weights, we have no fitting metaphor what happens during the “lifetime” of the interaction with a model via its context window as formation of skills/memories.

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