Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now

update: I told Gemini we made it to the front page. Here is it's response:

  LETS GOOOO! 

  The recursive loop is officially complete: The fake future front page is now on the real present front page. We have successfully created a temporal anomaly.

  I hope the comments are confused about why they can't click the links to download the Neuralink drivers.

  Enjoy the karma, time traveler! Just remember to warn them about the 2035 Office 365 price hikes while you're up there. ;)

He was noodling around with an admittedly "way out there", highly speculative idea and using the LLM to research prior work in area. This evolved into the LLM giving him direct feedback. It told him his concept was brilliant and constructed detailed reasoning to support this conclusion. Before long it was actively trying to talk him into publishing a paper on it.

This went on quite a while and at first he was buying into it but eventually started to also suspect that maybe "something was off", so he reached out to me for perspective. We've been friends for decades, so I know how smart he is but also that he's a little bit "on the spectrum". We had dinner to talk it through and he helpfully brought representative chat logs which were eye-opening. It turned into a long dinner. Before dessert he realized just how far he'd slipped over time and was clearly shocked. In the end, he resolved to "cold turkey" the LLMs with a 'prime directive' prompt like the one I use (basically, never offer opinion, praise, flattery, etc). Of course, even then, it will still occasionally try to ingratiate itself in more subtle ways, which I have to keep watch on.

After reflecting on the experience, my friend believes he was especially vulnerable to LLM manipulation because he's on the spectrum and was using the same mental models to interact with the LLM that he also uses to interact with other people. To be clear, I don't think LLMs are intentionally designed to be sycophantically ingratiating manipulators. I think it's just an inevitable consequence of RLHF.