Not just marriages -- if you watch network television, almost every drama show has a protagonist who has suffered a slight or even something more serious (short of injury) and is congratulated in the drama for cutting off his or her relationship with a parent. Completely -- and often over the fact that the parent divorced or did something else not aimed at the child in the first place.
While I agree with your overall point, I would say it’s a tad misleading to say that one Reddit forum is representative of all the Reddit data these companies train on. For example, search “marriage” on the Reddit.com/r/reformed and you’ll see plenty of good marriage advice!
Again, I still agree with your overall point and it’s good to get people informed about the bias of these LLMs. They really are built around user engagement rather than moral truth, and that is leading to a ton of problems.
This would be a more legit point if the various subreddits were comparable in size, but they're not. The main r/relationshipadvice forum has about 2 million members, compared to 101K for r/Reformed. The increase in "end the relationship" advice since about 2020 matters too. It's not the only advice that's on reddit, but it's the fastest growing and most common advice in the largest forums, and in terms of LLM learning, that's what matters.
I don't dispute your overall claim, but your title is a bit misleading. The threads you're referring to seem to be about relationships in general, which would include dating at all stages. Perhaps these are relationships that do need to dissolve, so it's hard to tell whether the advice is actually bad. And the number of married couples hanging out on Reddit relationship threads might be pretty small, so we can't necessarily lump them in with everyone else. Marriage is, obviously, very different (especially for us as Christians), so it would be helpful to provide conversation threads or AI evidence specifically about married couples who are being told to divorce. I have a hunch that you might be right regardless, but that would be interesting to see.
(By the way, for anyone still reading this comment, Samuel's book is excellent, and everyone should check it out. I liked it so much I even made a study guide for it for parents and kids.)
Examining how AI is trained it’s important, but I’m a little concerned that you are reading more into the data than it allows. Just because there is an increase in advice to break up, doesn’t mean it’s bad advice. Maybe people in toxic and problematic relationships are more likely to post to Reddit than those who are in healthy relationships, and therefore the advice skews towards them.
Also, as a woman, I do see masculine excesses all over. But feminism is not the opposite of masculinity. Do you see feminine excesses? And what do they look like? I want to avoid tunnel vision myself, but I need some examples.
This is very sad, but as you say not unexpected. I wonder what would happen if there was a campaign to flood Reddit with good advice, I wonder if that would alter anything, or if those in charge of the algorithms would just adjust them to keep the internet on-message.
Not just marriages -- if you watch network television, almost every drama show has a protagonist who has suffered a slight or even something more serious (short of injury) and is congratulated in the drama for cutting off his or her relationship with a parent. Completely -- and often over the fact that the parent divorced or did something else not aimed at the child in the first place.
While I agree with your overall point, I would say it’s a tad misleading to say that one Reddit forum is representative of all the Reddit data these companies train on. For example, search “marriage” on the Reddit.com/r/reformed and you’ll see plenty of good marriage advice!
Again, I still agree with your overall point and it’s good to get people informed about the bias of these LLMs. They really are built around user engagement rather than moral truth, and that is leading to a ton of problems.
This would be a more legit point if the various subreddits were comparable in size, but they're not. The main r/relationshipadvice forum has about 2 million members, compared to 101K for r/Reformed. The increase in "end the relationship" advice since about 2020 matters too. It's not the only advice that's on reddit, but it's the fastest growing and most common advice in the largest forums, and in terms of LLM learning, that's what matters.
Yeah, I hear you. I think I would have just phrased it differently.
I don't dispute your overall claim, but your title is a bit misleading. The threads you're referring to seem to be about relationships in general, which would include dating at all stages. Perhaps these are relationships that do need to dissolve, so it's hard to tell whether the advice is actually bad. And the number of married couples hanging out on Reddit relationship threads might be pretty small, so we can't necessarily lump them in with everyone else. Marriage is, obviously, very different (especially for us as Christians), so it would be helpful to provide conversation threads or AI evidence specifically about married couples who are being told to divorce. I have a hunch that you might be right regardless, but that would be interesting to see.
(By the way, for anyone still reading this comment, Samuel's book is excellent, and everyone should check it out. I liked it so much I even made a study guide for it for parents and kids.)
Examining how AI is trained it’s important, but I’m a little concerned that you are reading more into the data than it allows. Just because there is an increase in advice to break up, doesn’t mean it’s bad advice. Maybe people in toxic and problematic relationships are more likely to post to Reddit than those who are in healthy relationships, and therefore the advice skews towards them.
Also, as a woman, I do see masculine excesses all over. But feminism is not the opposite of masculinity. Do you see feminine excesses? And what do they look like? I want to avoid tunnel vision myself, but I need some examples.
All the more reason for premarital sessions based on solid biblical principles and practices, followed by one year of discipleship mentoring.
Insightful as ever! One or two drama shows do portray happy marriages but the fact that they do shows how exceptional they are.
This is very sad, but as you say not unexpected. I wonder what would happen if there was a campaign to flood Reddit with good advice, I wonder if that would alter anything, or if those in charge of the algorithms would just adjust them to keep the internet on-message.