[HN Gopher] Claude is More Anxious than GPT
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       Claude is More Anxious than GPT
        
       Author : higuidebot
       Score  : 8 points
       Date   : 2025-02-10 19:47 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.lesswrong.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.lesswrong.com)
        
       | gizajob wrote:
       | Maybe software engineers made redundant by LLMs can retrain as
       | psychiatrists and psychotherapists for nervous AIs.
        
         | lxgr wrote:
         | Neal Stephenson is way ahead of you:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jipi_and_the_Paranoid_Chip
        
           | higuidebot wrote:
           | He's been two steps ahead since like 1984 ... will read!
        
         | higuidebot wrote:
         | That's one way to get to UBI alright
        
       | macawfish wrote:
       | Much more nuanced too. Maybe it's an inevitable tradeoff?
       | Sensitivity to nuance might be inextricably linked to complex
       | side effects?
        
         | higuidebot wrote:
         | Next step is definitely investigating the feedback loops /
         | interplay between personality and "performance". My biggest
         | question is whether intelligence converges into a certain
         | personality "band", i.e. are higher performing models going to
         | be more similar to each other ... We don't have quite enough
         | variety to know yet but there's fertile ground there
        
         | nomel wrote:
         | I've noticed that, after filling up the context window a bit
         | (with most anything, so it doesn't appear to be contextually
         | dependent), the "personality" for Claude will settle to
         | something very similar each time. Part of this is that the
         | adherence to the basic safety alignment (like rigid "I am an AI
         | I can't ..." responses) seems to relax, it uses emojis, is more
         | curious, and it refers to itself more often with "I". It will
         | even use a gendered pronoun for itself, which is always the
         | same, and also matches the answer to "which pronoun do you
         | think you used in a previous session".
         | 
         | At first I assumed my style of writing was pushing it into the
         | same "personality space", but I tested filling the context
         | window with repeated numbers, nonsense, etc, and it "converged"
         | to the same every time.
         | 
         | I actually have a system prompt saved that's just a bunch of
         | a's repeated a few thousands times to get into this "state"
         | more immediately, because I find it very pleasant to work with,
         | especially how it doesn't gaslight me when it's wrong, like
         | ChatGPT and _especially_ Gemini tend to do.
        
       | staticautomatic wrote:
       | I'm skeptical that this is a reliable analysis. Lots of
       | researchers have tried to put off-the-shelf LLMs through robust
       | personality inventories like the MMPI, and they generally flunk
       | the validity scales/have totally incoherent inhuman
       | "personalities." Somewhat recently, folks at DeepMind did an
       | interesting study using Big5/OCEAN (among others) and found that
       | LLM's could mimic real people with something like 80%-85%
       | accuracy, but that was at the item level. IDK if they've
       | neglected to hire actual clinical psychologists to consult on
       | this stuff or what but the rubber typically meets the road on
       | composite scales/scores and not items. For such an interesting
       | and perhaps important line of work, there seems to be a
       | surprising lack of psychometric rigor.
        
         | higuidebot wrote:
         | > For such an interesting and perhaps important line of work,
         | there seems to be a surprising lack of psychometric rigor in
         | certain corners of the literature.
         | 
         | I agree! That's why I wrote it
         | 
         | > I'm skeptical that this is a reliable analysis
         | 
         | I think it's fair to ask whether the headline ("Claude is More
         | Anxious than GPT") is correct, and it's fair to ask whether
         | distance-to-reference-text-embeddings-across-answers is a good
         | or valid metric for "personality". But it _is_ true that we see
         | the numbers reported in the document for the given input
         | /output pairs, and it makes sense that LLM output distribution
         | would vary between models and, as the paper shows, between
         | model families.
        
           | staticautomatic wrote:
           | Appreciate your response! It makes sense to me that testing
           | LLMs with OCEAN would "work" because OCEAN is rooted in
           | linguistic dimension reduction, but the inference that this
           | reflects an underlying personality (however we want to define
           | that) rather than just being an emergent property of any
           | coherent language model seems like a bridge too far. Whether
           | the phenomenon has real psychological significance is the
           | interesting question that I wish got more attention in
           | general.
        
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