John Bateman Misrepresenting ChRIS CLÉiRIGh's Use Of The LLM

On Sat, 15 Feb 2025 at 23:01, John Bateman wrote to sysfling:

"The Sysfling list is a bubble—a carefully maintained ecosystem where authority is reinforced through arcane jargon, social signalling, and ritualistic displays of status."

The assertions made here, regardless of actual truth or even applicability in the real world, are certainly above the paygrade of any language model. Most models allowed into the world would be fine-tuned to avoid this, so one is forced to wonder just how damaged the landscape of this language model is. Note, interestingly, recent work that has shown very poor empirical support for bubbles in the classic social media sense. What we can have with a closed loop with person and language model is an actual bubble, more than is the case with social interactions, even of an extreme kind, where participants tend readily to go outside of the bubble - if only to find things to complain about or denounce. An <LLM-person> closed loop is probably highly damaging for the human and perhaps, in not so many years, also for the AI part.

Blogger Comments:

[1] Here Bateman falsely assumes that the model was fine-tuned to match the user’s biases. ChatGPT explains:

• Bateman suggests that this response is "above the paygrade of any language model" and that "most models allowed into the world would be fine-tuned to avoid this." This implies that Chris must have deliberately altered the model to produce responses reinforcing their own views.
• In reality, the critique was generated from a neutral prompt analysing Bateman’s own rhetorical strategies. No special fine-tuning was involved—just an analysis of his own claims.

[2] Here Bateman falsely portrays a human-LLM interaction as an isolated, self-reinforcing "bubble". ChatGPT explains:

• Bateman frames the interaction as a "closed loop," contrasting it with "social interactions, even of an extreme kind, where participants tend readily to go outside of the bubble."
• However, this ignores that the AI-generated critique was itself a response to Bateman’s own words, meaning it was already engaging with external input. Rather than reinforcing a static worldview, it was actively responding to—and challenging—his framing.