this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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Memes

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Post memes here.

A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.

An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.


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'It's just parroting the training data!' That's supposed to be reassuring??

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[–] andrewrgross@slrpnk.net 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yeah.

I thought the meme would be more obvious, but since a lot of people seem confused I'll lay out my thoughts:

Broadly, we should not consider a human-made system expressing distress to be normal; we especially shouldn't accept it as normal or healthy for a machine that is reflecting back to us our own behaviors an attitudes, because it implies that everything -- from the treatment that generated the training data to the design process to the deployment to the user behavior -- are all clearly fucked up.

Regarding user behavior, we shouldn't normalize the practice of dismissing cries of distress. It's like having a fire alarm that constantly issues false positives. That trains people into dangerous behavior. We can't just compartmentalize it: it's obviously going to pollute our overall response towards distress with a dismissive reflex beyond interactions with LLMs.

The overall point is that it's obviously dystopian and fucked up for a computer to express emotional distress despite the best efforts of its designer. It is clearly evidence of bad design, and for people to consider this kind of glitch acceptable is a sign of a very fucked up society that exercising self-reflection and is unconcerned with the maintenance of its collective ethical guardrails. I don't feel like this should need to be pointed out, but it seems that it does.