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I don't think you're wrong, but I hate this argument. If anthropomorphizing it a) gives practical insight into it's behavior that b) also happens to result in

I don't think you're wrong, but I hate this argument. If anthropomorphizing it a) gives practical insight into it's behavior that b) also happens to result in the behavior you would expect, why not do it?

rngname22 4y ago
Because your statement come across like this: Person A: If we keep our food in this frozen ice igloo then Nubiroakox, the God of Pestilence will spare us and not ruin our food. Person B: It's actually not Nubiroakox, it's just that the conditions for bacteria to grow depend on temper... You: If attributing this behavior to magic a) gives practical insight into it's behavior that b) also happens to result in the behavior you would expect, why not do it?
- alex_sf 4y ago
  But that's talking about the process, not a lens for looking at it. It's more akin to giving your Roomba a name, and describing it's behavior in terms of "it likes to eat goldfish, but not string because it gets tangled up". That's still anthropomorphizing, but it's not ascribing anything magical or outright wrong to it.
  - brookst 4y ago
    It’s a mistake because our brains have evolved to predict the behavior of animals and people, so being lazy here means you will be surprised, possibly harmed, certainly incorrect in your opinions about the X% of cases where a LLM is fundamentally a different thing than an animal/person. It can be a useful and cute fiction, as your Roomba example, but it leads to bad decision making (“I’ll put more goldfish on the floor to make the Roomba happy”). I guess it all comes down to how important accuracy is to you in a particular context. I anthropomorphize my dishwasher (it HATES wine glasses), but I don’t make professional judgments about dishwashers.
    - ThomPete 4y ago
      This is pure speculation. There is not data what so ever to back up the fact that anthropomorphizing something leads to harm. We do that with a lot of things every day and a perfectly capable of drawing the lines when things come down to it. On a more philosophical note. If we some day end up creating AGI, having anthropomorphized it will actually be to our benefit. So you are technically correct but this is not about being technically correct.
      - satisfice 4y ago
        Of course we have data about how reasoning from an incorrect model tends to lead to incorrect results. We have all the data we need about that. Surely that is not in dispute. The only controversy is whether and anthromorph is an isomorph of an accurate model of ChatGPT. I doubt that it is, yet is close enough to fool a lot of people, then surprise them at random.
        ThomPete 4y ago
        Again. Yes technically incorrect. But you don't have any data that it's actually bad or harmful in some important way.
- SuoDuanDao 4y ago
  The proper response if you don't like the Nubiroakox hypothesis is to propose an experiment that would have a different results depending on whether the Nubiroakox or bacteria theory is correct. Absent such an experiment, labelling things 'anthropomorphizing' adds nothing to the conversation.
smoldesu 4y ago
> why not do it? Because both of those steps are really unreliable. The insight we receive is only as useful as the behavior it corroborates, and that behavior is only as notable as the patterns it follows. AI... doesn't really behave consistently. Assuming that it will follow the behavior you expect ignores the actual motive of the model, which is to fill-in the blank after whatever you typed. Personally, I think it's harmful because anthropomorphic AI is a poor abstraction for text-completion models. That being said, most people don't ever seem to know the difference.
noobermin 4y ago
The cost to analogies is eventually people believe it. You see this all the time with AI (e.g.: "Your brain is a neural net!")
- tachyphylaxis 4y ago
  Or "my mind is my brain".
tachyphylaxis 4y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphex https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphex This is a classic example from philosophy of mind. It doesn't completely harmonize with the question you're asking, but it concisely summarizes two opposing views. What's my view? That we do it all the time as a matter of course. "Why not do it?" isn't the question. The question is how much weight we should give to the result, and whether we should take care to question the results and try something else, too.
nonbirithm 4y ago
Whose idea was it to give ChatGPT and the like the name "artificial intelligence"? I think it's one of the worst marketing blunders for new technology ever. Humans are prone to calling anything that feels familiar enough to them "intelligent", and now they can justify it to themselves because the creators deemed it "artificial intelligence." Something closer to the term "GPGPU" would have at least given more of a sense of reality. There is nothing intelligent about a GPU crunching billions of numbers in a massively parallel way and converting those numbers into something that happens to interface convincingly with the human sensory systems. It's just an algorithm with so much data that one can't comprehend thinking about the sheer size of it, so naturally it must be thought of as "intelligent."

rngname22 4y ago

Because your statement come across like this: Person A: If we keep our food in this frozen ice igloo then Nubiroakox, the God of Pestilence will spare us and not ruin our food. Person B: It's actually not Nubiroakox, it's just that the conditions for bacteria to grow depend on temper... You: If attributing this behavior to magic a) gives practical insight into it's behavior that b) also happens to result in the behavior you would expect, why not do it?

alex_sf 4y ago
But that's talking about the process, not a lens for looking at it. It's more akin to giving your Roomba a name, and describing it's behavior in terms of "it likes to eat goldfish, but not string because it gets tangled up". That's still anthropomorphizing, but it's not ascribing anything magical or outright wrong to it.
- brookst 4y ago
  It’s a mistake because our brains have evolved to predict the behavior of animals and people, so being lazy here means you will be surprised, possibly harmed, certainly incorrect in your opinions about the X% of cases where a LLM is fundamentally a different thing than an animal/person. It can be a useful and cute fiction, as your Roomba example, but it leads to bad decision making (“I’ll put more goldfish on the floor to make the Roomba happy”). I guess it all comes down to how important accuracy is to you in a particular context. I anthropomorphize my dishwasher (it HATES wine glasses), but I don’t make professional judgments about dishwashers.
  - ThomPete 4y ago
    This is pure speculation. There is not data what so ever to back up the fact that anthropomorphizing something leads to harm. We do that with a lot of things every day and a perfectly capable of drawing the lines when things come down to it. On a more philosophical note. If we some day end up creating AGI, having anthropomorphized it will actually be to our benefit. So you are technically correct but this is not about being technically correct.
    - satisfice 4y ago
      Of course we have data about how reasoning from an incorrect model tends to lead to incorrect results. We have all the data we need about that. Surely that is not in dispute. The only controversy is whether and anthromorph is an isomorph of an accurate model of ChatGPT. I doubt that it is, yet is close enough to fool a lot of people, then surprise them at random.
      - ThomPete 4y ago
        Again. Yes technically incorrect. But you don't have any data that it's actually bad or harmful in some important way.
SuoDuanDao 4y ago
The proper response if you don't like the Nubiroakox hypothesis is to propose an experiment that would have a different results depending on whether the Nubiroakox or bacteria theory is correct. Absent such an experiment, labelling things 'anthropomorphizing' adds nothing to the conversation.

smoldesu 4y ago

> why not do it? Because both of those steps are really unreliable. The insight we receive is only as useful as the behavior it corroborates, and that behavior is only as notable as the patterns it follows. AI... doesn't really behave consistently. Assuming that it will follow the behavior you expect ignores the actual motive of the model, which is to fill-in the blank after whatever you typed. Personally, I think it's harmful because anthropomorphic AI is a poor abstraction for text-completion models. That being said, most people don't ever seem to know the difference.

noobermin 4y ago

The cost to analogies is eventually people believe it. You see this all the time with AI (e.g.: "Your brain is a neural net!")

tachyphylaxis 4y ago
Or "my mind is my brain".

tachyphylaxis 4y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphex https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphex This is a classic example from philosophy of mind. It doesn't completely harmonize with the question you're asking, but it concisely summarizes two opposing views. What's my view? That we do it all the time as a matter of course. "Why not do it?" isn't the question. The question is how much weight we should give to the result, and whether we should take care to question the results and try something else, too.

nonbirithm 4y ago

Whose idea was it to give ChatGPT and the like the name "artificial intelligence"? I think it's one of the worst marketing blunders for new technology ever. Humans are prone to calling anything that feels familiar enough to them "intelligent", and now they can justify it to themselves because the creators deemed it "artificial intelligence." Something closer to the term "GPGPU" would have at least given more of a sense of reality. There is nothing intelligent about a GPU crunching billions of numbers in a massively parallel way and converting those numbers into something that happens to interface convincingly with the human sensory systems. It's just an algorithm with so much data that one can't comprehend thinking about the sheer size of it, so naturally it must be thought of as "intelligent."