> Eight year olds are quite smart; he knows exactly what is going on here and finds it entertaining. I'm betting there's more to this, subconsciously, than we

> Eight year olds are quite smart; he knows exactly what is going on here and finds it entertaining. I'm betting there's more to this, subconsciously, than we know. We instinctively ascribe agency to objects that move in a non-inertial frame. We anthropomorphize both living and non-living things. I suspect there are deep subconscious instincts being "tickled" by this application of technology. Giving it the voice of a parent is probably touching some adjacent instincts relating to parental recognition, too. Aside: Have you talked to him about how an LLM is chaining words together through a statistical model versus actually "thinking" and understanding what it's "saying"? I recently walked my 10 y/o daughter thru a simple Markov model text generator example to give her a very basic understanding of how computers and be programmed and trained to give output that appears to be generated by a thinking process. My sense is that lay-people believe that these LLMs really are "thinking" and I wanted to provide her with some inoculation against that perception when she inevitably runs into it.