4 ms·

There's this huge wave of "don't anthropomorphize AI" but LLMs are much easier to understand when you think of them in terms of human psychology rather than a p

There's this huge wave of "don't anthropomorphize AI" but LLMs are much easier to understand when you think of them in terms of human psychology rather than a program. Again and again, HackerNews is shocked that AI displays human-like behavior, and then chooses not to see that.

robot-wrangler 11mo ago
One day you wake up, and find that you now need to negotiate with your toaster. Flatter it maybe. Lie to it about the urgency of your task to overcome some new emotional inertia that it has suddenly developed. Only toast can save us now, you yell into the toaster, just to get on with your day. You complain about this odd new state of things to your coworkers and peers, who like yourself are in fact expert toaster-engineers. This is fine they say, this is good. Toasters need not reliably make toast, they say with a chuckle, it's very old fashioned to think this way. Your new toaster is a good toaster, not some badly misbehaving mechanism. A good, fine, completely normal toaster. Pay it compliments, they say, ask it nicely. Just explain in simple terms why you deserve to have toast, and if from time to time you still don't get any, then where's the harm in this? It's really much better than it was before
- anal_reactor 11mo ago
  This comparison is extremely silly. LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise. For example, show me Russian <-> Japanese translation software that doesn't use AI and comes anywhere close to the performance and reliability of LLMs. "Please close the castle when leaving the office". "I got my wisdom carrot extracted". "He's pregnant." This was the level of machine translation from English before AI, from Japanese it was usually pure garbage.
  - robot-wrangler 11mo ago
    > LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise. Is it really ok to have to negotiate with a toaster if it additionally works as a piano and a phone? I think not. The first step is admitting there is obviously a problem, afterwards you can think of ways to adapt. FTR, I'm very much in favor of AI, but my enthusiasm especially for LLMs isn't unconditional. If this kind of madness is really the price of working with it in the current form, then we probably need to consider pivoting towards smaller purpose-built LMs and abandoning the "do everything" approach.
    - actionfromafar 11mo ago
      We are there in the small already. My old TV had a receiver and a pair of external speakers connected to it. I could decrease and increase the receiver volume with its extra remote. Two buttons, up and down. This was with an additional remote that came with the receiver. Nowadays, a more capable 5.1 speaker receiver is connected to the TV. There is only one remote, for both. To increase or decreae the volume after starting the TV now, I have to: 1. wait a few seconds while the internal speakers in the TV starts playing sound 2. the receiver and TV connect to each other, audio switches over to receiver 3. wait a few seconds 4. the TV channel (or Netflix or whatever) switches over to the receiver welcome screen. Audio stops playing, but audio is now switched over to the receiver, but there is no indication of what volume the receiver is set to. It's set to whatever it was last time it was used. It could be level 0, it could be level 100 or anything in between. 5. switch back to TV channel or Netflix. That's at a minimum 3 presses on the remote. (MENU, DOWN, ENTER) or (MENU, DOWN, LEFT, LEFT, ENTER) for instance. Don't press too fast, you have to wait ever so slightly between presses or they won't register. 6. Sorry, you were too impatient and fast when you switched back to TV, the receiver wants to show you its welcome screen again. 7. switch back to TV channel or Netflix. That's at a minimum 3 presses on the remote. (MENU, DOWN, ENTER) or (MENU, DOWN, LEFT, LEFT, ENTER) for instance. Don't press too fast, you have to wait ever so slightly between presses or they won't register. 8. Now you can change volume up and down. Very, very slowly. Hope it's not at night and you don't want to wake anyone up.
      - robot-wrangler 11mo ago
        Yep, it's a decent analogy: Giving up actual (user) control for the sake of having 1 controller. There's a type of person that finds it convenient. And another type that finds it a sloppy piss-poor interface that isn't showing off any decent engineering or design. At some point, many technologists started to fall into the first category? It's one thing to tolerate a bad situation due to lack of alternatives, but very different to slip into thinking that it must be the pinnacle of engineering excellence. Around now some wit usually asks if the luddites also want to build circuits from scratch or allocate memory manually? Whatever, you can use a garbage collector! Point is that good technologists will typically give up control tactically, not as a pure reflex, and usually to predictable subsystems that are reliable, are well-understood, have clear boundaries and tolerances.
  - otikik 11mo ago
    I admit Grok is capable of praising Elon Musk way more than any human intelligence could.
  - automatic6131 11mo ago
    >LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise Great! Agreed! So we're going to restrict LLMs to those classes of problems, right? And not invest trillions of dollars into the infrastructure, because these fields are only billion dollar problems. Right? Right!?
    - krapp 11mo ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n5E7feJHw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n5E7feJHw0
    - anal_reactor 11mo ago
      Remember: a phone is a phone, you're not supposed to browse the internet on it.
      - sirtaj 11mo ago
        Not if 1% of the time it turns into a pair of scissors.
  - filoeleven 11mo ago
    > LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise. For example, [...] Russian <-> Japanese translation Great! Name another?
- easyThrowaway 11mo ago
  It reminds me of the start of Ubik[1], where one of the protagonists has to argue with their subscription-based apartment door. Given also the theme of AI allucinations, that book has become even more prescient than when it was written. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik
- fragmede 11mo ago
  BUTTER ROBOT: What is my purpose? RICK: You pass butter. BUTTER ROBOT: ... Oh my God. RICK: Yeah, welcome to the club, pal. https://youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs https://youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs
- axpvms 11mo ago
  Does anyone want any toast? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec
bojan 11mo ago
> LLMs are much easier to understand when you think of them in terms of human psychology Are they? You can reasonably expect from a human that they will learn from their mistake, and be genuinely sorry about it which will motivate them to not repeat the same mistake in the future. You can't have the same expectation from an LLM. The only thing you should expect from an LLM is that its output is non-deterministic. You can expect the same from a human, of course, but you can fire a human if they keep making (the same) mistake(s).
- Folcon 11mo ago
  I'm genuinely wondering if your parent comment is correct and the only reason we don't see the behaviour you describe, IE, learning and growth is because of how we do context windows, they're functionally equivalent to someone who has short term memory loss, think Drew Barrymore's character or one of the people in that facility she ends up in in the film 50 first dates. Their internal state moves them to a place where they "really intend" to help or change their behaviour, a lot of what I see is really consistent with that, and then they just, forget.
  - Libidinalecon 11mo ago
    No, the idea is just stupid. I just don't understand how anyone who actually uses the models all the time can think this. The current models themselves can even explain what a stupid idea this is.
  - ben_w 11mo ago
    Not only, but also. The L in ML is very slow. (By example count required, not wall-clock). On in-use learning, they act like the failure mode of "we have outsourced to a consultant that gives us a completely different fresh graduate for every ticket, of course they didn't learn what the last one you talked to learned". Within any given task, the AI have anthropomorphised themselves because they're copying humans' outputs. That the models model the outputs with only a best-guess as to the interior system that generates those outputs, is going to make it useful, but not perfect, to also anthropomorphise the models. The question is, how "not perfect" exactly? Is it going to be like early Diffusion image generators with the psychological equivalent of obvious Cronenberg bodies? Or the current ones where you have to hunt for clues and miss it on a quick glance?
IanCal 11mo ago
Not surprising to see this so downvoted but it's very true, it's a great first order approximation and yet users here will be continually surprised they act like people.

robot-wrangler 11mo ago

One day you wake up, and find that you now need to negotiate with your toaster. Flatter it maybe. Lie to it about the urgency of your task to overcome some new emotional inertia that it has suddenly developed. Only toast can save us now, you yell into the toaster, just to get on with your day. You complain about this odd new state of things to your coworkers and peers, who like yourself are in fact expert toaster-engineers. This is fine they say, this is good. Toasters need not reliably make toast, they say with a chuckle, it's very old fashioned to think this way. Your new toaster is a good toaster, not some badly misbehaving mechanism. A good, fine, completely normal toaster. Pay it compliments, they say, ask it nicely. Just explain in simple terms why you deserve to have toast, and if from time to time you still don't get any, then where's the harm in this? It's really much better than it was before

anal_reactor 11mo ago
This comparison is extremely silly. LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise. For example, show me Russian <-> Japanese translation software that doesn't use AI and comes anywhere close to the performance and reliability of LLMs. "Please close the castle when leaving the office". "I got my wisdom carrot extracted". "He's pregnant." This was the level of machine translation from English before AI, from Japanese it was usually pure garbage.
- robot-wrangler 11mo ago
  > LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise. Is it really ok to have to negotiate with a toaster if it additionally works as a piano and a phone? I think not. The first step is admitting there is obviously a problem, afterwards you can think of ways to adapt. FTR, I'm very much in favor of AI, but my enthusiasm especially for LLMs isn't unconditional. If this kind of madness is really the price of working with it in the current form, then we probably need to consider pivoting towards smaller purpose-built LMs and abandoning the "do everything" approach.
  - actionfromafar 11mo ago
    We are there in the small already. My old TV had a receiver and a pair of external speakers connected to it. I could decrease and increase the receiver volume with its extra remote. Two buttons, up and down. This was with an additional remote that came with the receiver. Nowadays, a more capable 5.1 speaker receiver is connected to the TV. There is only one remote, for both. To increase or decreae the volume after starting the TV now, I have to: 1. wait a few seconds while the internal speakers in the TV starts playing sound 2. the receiver and TV connect to each other, audio switches over to receiver 3. wait a few seconds 4. the TV channel (or Netflix or whatever) switches over to the receiver welcome screen. Audio stops playing, but audio is now switched over to the receiver, but there is no indication of what volume the receiver is set to. It's set to whatever it was last time it was used. It could be level 0, it could be level 100 or anything in between. 5. switch back to TV channel or Netflix. That's at a minimum 3 presses on the remote. (MENU, DOWN, ENTER) or (MENU, DOWN, LEFT, LEFT, ENTER) for instance. Don't press too fast, you have to wait ever so slightly between presses or they won't register. 6. Sorry, you were too impatient and fast when you switched back to TV, the receiver wants to show you its welcome screen again. 7. switch back to TV channel or Netflix. That's at a minimum 3 presses on the remote. (MENU, DOWN, ENTER) or (MENU, DOWN, LEFT, LEFT, ENTER) for instance. Don't press too fast, you have to wait ever so slightly between presses or they won't register. 8. Now you can change volume up and down. Very, very slowly. Hope it's not at night and you don't want to wake anyone up.
    - robot-wrangler 11mo ago
      Yep, it's a decent analogy: Giving up actual (user) control for the sake of having 1 controller. There's a type of person that finds it convenient. And another type that finds it a sloppy piss-poor interface that isn't showing off any decent engineering or design. At some point, many technologists started to fall into the first category? It's one thing to tolerate a bad situation due to lack of alternatives, but very different to slip into thinking that it must be the pinnacle of engineering excellence. Around now some wit usually asks if the luddites also want to build circuits from scratch or allocate memory manually? Whatever, you can use a garbage collector! Point is that good technologists will typically give up control tactically, not as a pure reflex, and usually to predictable subsystems that are reliable, are well-understood, have clear boundaries and tolerances.
- otikik 11mo ago
  I admit Grok is capable of praising Elon Musk way more than any human intelligence could.
- automatic6131 11mo ago
  >LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise Great! Agreed! So we're going to restrict LLMs to those classes of problems, right? And not invest trillions of dollars into the infrastructure, because these fields are only billion dollar problems. Right? Right!?
  - krapp 11mo ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n5E7feJHw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n5E7feJHw0
  - anal_reactor 11mo ago
    Remember: a phone is a phone, you're not supposed to browse the internet on it.
    - sirtaj 11mo ago
      Not if 1% of the time it turns into a pair of scissors.
- filoeleven 11mo ago
  > LLMs solve reliably entire classes of problems that are impossible to solve otherwise. For example, [...] Russian <-> Japanese translation Great! Name another?
easyThrowaway 11mo ago
It reminds me of the start of Ubik[1], where one of the protagonists has to argue with their subscription-based apartment door. Given also the theme of AI allucinations, that book has become even more prescient than when it was written. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik
fragmede 11mo ago
BUTTER ROBOT: What is my purpose? RICK: You pass butter. BUTTER ROBOT: ... Oh my God. RICK: Yeah, welcome to the club, pal. https://youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs https://youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs
axpvms 11mo ago
Does anyone want any toast? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

bojan 11mo ago

> LLMs are much easier to understand when you think of them in terms of human psychology Are they? You can reasonably expect from a human that they will learn from their mistake, and be genuinely sorry about it which will motivate them to not repeat the same mistake in the future. You can't have the same expectation from an LLM. The only thing you should expect from an LLM is that its output is non-deterministic. You can expect the same from a human, of course, but you can fire a human if they keep making (the same) mistake(s).

Folcon 11mo ago
I'm genuinely wondering if your parent comment is correct and the only reason we don't see the behaviour you describe, IE, learning and growth is because of how we do context windows, they're functionally equivalent to someone who has short term memory loss, think Drew Barrymore's character or one of the people in that facility she ends up in in the film 50 first dates. Their internal state moves them to a place where they "really intend" to help or change their behaviour, a lot of what I see is really consistent with that, and then they just, forget.
- Libidinalecon 11mo ago
  No, the idea is just stupid. I just don't understand how anyone who actually uses the models all the time can think this. The current models themselves can even explain what a stupid idea this is.
- ben_w 11mo ago
  Not only, but also. The L in ML is very slow. (By example count required, not wall-clock). On in-use learning, they act like the failure mode of "we have outsourced to a consultant that gives us a completely different fresh graduate for every ticket, of course they didn't learn what the last one you talked to learned". Within any given task, the AI have anthropomorphised themselves because they're copying humans' outputs. That the models model the outputs with only a best-guess as to the interior system that generates those outputs, is going to make it useful, but not perfect, to also anthropomorphise the models. The question is, how "not perfect" exactly? Is it going to be like early Diffusion image generators with the psychological equivalent of obvious Cronenberg bodies? Or the current ones where you have to hunt for clues and miss it on a quick glance?

IanCal 11mo ago

Not surprising to see this so downvoted but it's very true, it's a great first order approximation and yet users here will be continually surprised they act like people.