Show HN: What if AI agents had Zodiac personalities?
A fun game for playing moral dilemmas with friends. I gave 12 AI agents zodiac personalities (not that I believe in them) using the same LLM with different personality prompts.
A related trick - if you want to teach your agent a specific kind of behavior, and want this behavior to be calibrated and safe, what you can do is:

1. enumerate the actions (policies) your agent takes, collected from prior runs

2. infer the states that correspond to each of these policies, make a state atlas (similar to the zodiac here)

3. infer the maximally discriminative features that can identify the state from current context

4. label a few examples and train a small policy model that predicts your action from those state features

I think LLMs should be used more often like this - as feature extractors for toy models, which can be used like tools. This way you can encode arbitrary logic in a small tool model that does not depend on the biases of the base model. For example this setup could power a "skill" to reliably implement your policy.

The trick here is that you carefully identify states that predict policy reliably, and features that distinguish between states, instead of using embeddings or pure LLM reasoning. You can decouple the logic from the feature extraction, and have it calibrated to your goals.

All 4 steps can be done by a coding agent with your supervision and zero coding. It's LLM as generic feature extractor with small models sitting on top.

  • keyle
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That is a fun experiment which can be interesting applied to all sorts of things.

Imagine being captain of a ship and using the same AI with different profiles as background. E.g. what's your opinion on data based on a geologist profile, vs. a profile based on some other profession...

There's a lot of papers on society of mind experiments to look into
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this is fantastic. Really interesting to see which signs decided what.
[flagged]
  • dang
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"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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I somehow assumed this was going to be about the Zodiac killer and was really confused.
I don’t see the point of using zodiacs. Might as well use any kind of personality test like Myers-Briggs.
  • Terr_
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I imagine the best way to do this will be whatever quickly evokes a large amount of highly-correlated tokens for the kind of fictional character the user wants to see in the story.

In other words, the completeness or scientific rigor of the original categorization and naming is irrelevant, compared to its consistency and presence in the training data.

In some cases, the most straightforward approach might be to name a particularly popular character by name.