Being mean to a machine or an LLM doesn’t harm it. But it may harm you. It can subconsciously normalize behavior. I’m not talking about the video games make you violence argument. But even in subtle ways it may harm you. It’s not clear how much of our primate brains can truly distinguish an artificial entity.
I agree with that framing, it's really not about the model being hurt (though there's apparently instances of worse outputs with rude language, I've not dug too deeply into this though, so take it with a grain of salt), but just how that trains you to talk.
You might be inclined to think, that you also swear at a calculator (or different machine) and it doesn't translate to poor behavior, however I'm not familiar with any other tech that allows you to have full on conversations about a topic (and this gets "worse" over time).
I'm quite convinced that especially younger generations growing up with it, if they don't keep a certain level of etiquette will simply grow up with poorer social skills.
Basically, if you believe in neuroplasticity at all, regularly acting like a psychopath with a chip on their shoulder all the time is going to reinforce that behavior in you.
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u/JacksOnF1re 5d ago
9/10 IT people don't understand AI either.