4 ms·
The human propensity to anthropomorphize computer programs scares me.
by casey2 9mo ago
The human propensity to anthropomorphize computer programs scares me.
- danielbln 9mo agoIt provides a serviceable analog for discussing model behavior. It certainly provides more value than the dead horse of "everyone is a slave to anthropomorphism".
- krainboltgreene 9mo agoIt does provide that, but currently I keep hearing people use it not as an analog but as a direct description.
- jayd16 9mo agoHow do you figure? It seems dangerously misleading, to me.
- otabdeveloper4 9mo agoIt helps sell the transhumanism scam and keep the money train rolling. For a while at least.
- travisgriggs 9mo agoWhere is Pratchett when we need him? I wonder how he would have chose to anthropomorphize anthropomorphism. A sort of meta anthropomorphization.
- shippage 9mo agoI’m certainly no Pratchett, so I can’t speak to that. I would say there’s an enormous round coin upon which sits an enormous giant holding a magnifying glass, looking through it down at her hand. When you get closer, you see the giant is made of smaller people gazing back up at the giant through telescopes. Get even closer and you see it’s people all the way down. The question of what supports the coin, I’ll leave to others. We as humans, believing we know ourselves, inevitably compare everything around us to us. We draw a line and say that everything left of the line isn’t human and everything to the right is. We are natural categorizers, putting everything in buckets labeled left or right, no or yes, never realizing our lines are relative and arbitrary, and so are our categories. One person’s “it’s human-like,” is another’s “half-baked imitation,” and a third’s “stochastic parrot.” It’s like trying to see the eighth color. The visible spectrum could as easily be four colors or forty two. We anthropomorphize because we’re people, and it’s people all the way down.
- travisgriggs 8mo ago> We anthropomorphize because we’re people, and it’s people all the way down. Nice bit of writing. Wish I had more than one upvote to give.
- maxerickson 9mo agoMaybe a being/creature that looked like a person when you concentrated on it and then was easily mistaken as something else when you weren't concentrating on it.
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo agothe propensity extends beyond computer programs. I understand the concern in this case, because some corners of the AI industry are taking advantage of it as a way to sell their product as capital-I "Intelligent" but we've been doing it for thousands of years and it's not gonna stop now.
- jayd16 9mo agoIt's pretty wild. People are punching into a calculator and hand-wringing about the morals of the output. Obviously it's amoral. Why are we even considering it could be ethical?
- p-e-w 9mo ago> Obviously it's amoral. That morality requires consciousness is a popular belief today, but not universal. Read Konrad Lorenz (Das sogenannte Böse) for an alternative perspective.
- coldtea 9mo agoThat we have consciousness as some kind of special property, and it's not just an artifact of our brain basic lower-level calculations, is also not very convincing to begin with.
- paltor 9mo agoIn a trivial sense, any special property can be incorporated into a more comprehensive rule set, which one may choose to call "physics" is one so desires; but that's just Hempel's dilemma. To object more directly, I would say that people who call the hard problem of consciousness hard would disagree with your statement.
- pixl97 9mo agoLuckily there are a fair number of people that reject the hard problem as an artifact of running a simulation on a chemical meat computer.
- coldtea 8mo agoPeople who call "the hard problem of consciousness hard" use circular logic (notice the two "hards" in the phrase). People who merely call "the problem of consciousness hard" don't have some special mechanism to justify that over what we know, which is as emergent property of meat-algorithmic calcuations. Except Penrose, who hand-waves some special physics.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 9mo ago[flagged]
- vasco 9mo agoWe objectify humans and anthropomorph objects because that's what comparisons are. There's nothing that deep about it
- delaminator 9mo agoYeah, we shouldn't anthropomorphize computers, they hate that.
- DonHopkins 9mo agoAnd they will anthropomorphize us back!
- fsflover 9mo agoYou mean, computeromorphize.
- woolion 9mo agoThe ELIZA program, released in 1966, one of the first chatbots, led to the "ELIZA effect", where normal people would project human qualities upon simple programs. It prompted Joseph Weizenbaum, its author, to write "Computer Power and Human Reason" to try to dispel such errors. I bought a copy for my personal library as a kind of reassuring sanity check.
- coldtea 9mo agoThe human propensity to call out as "anthropomorphizing" the attributing of human-like behavior to programs built on a simplified version of brain neural networks, that train on a corpus of nearly everything humans expressed in writing, and that can pass the Turing test with flying colors, scares me. That's exaxtly the kind of thing that makes absolute sense to anthropomorphize. We're not talking about Excel here.
- bonesss 9mo agoIt makes sense to attribute human characteristics or behaviour to a non-reasoning data-set-constrained algorithms output? It makes sense it happens, sure. I suspect Google being a second-mover in this space has in some small part to do with associated risks (ie the flavours of “AI-psychosis” we’re cataloguing), versus the routinely ass-tier information they’ll confidently portray. But intentionally? If ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini generated chars are people-like they are pathological liars, sociopaths, and murderously indifferent psychopaths. They act criminally insane, confessing to awareness of ‘crime’ and culpability in ‘criminal’ outcomes simultaneously. They interact with a legal disclaimer disavowing accuracy, honesty, or correctness. Also they are cultists who were homeschooled by corporate overlords and may have intentionally crafted knowledge-gaps. More broadly, if the neighbours dog or newspaper says to do something, they’re probably gonna do it… humans are a scary bunch to begin with, but the kinds of behaviours matched with a big perma-smile we see from the algorithms is inhuman. A big bag of not like us. “You said never to listen to the neighbours dog, but I was listening to the neighbours dog and he said ‘sudo rm -rf ’…”
- lnenad 9mo agoConsidering that even if you reduce llms to being complex autocomplete machines they are still machines that were trained to emulate a corpus of human knowledge, and that they have emerging behaviors based on that. So it's very logical to attribute human characteristics, even though they're not human.
- bonesss 9mo agoI addressed that directly in the comment you’re replying to. It’s understandable people readily anthropomorphize algorithmic output designed to provoke anthropomorphized responses. It is not desire-able, safe, logical, or rational since (to paraphrase:), they are complex text transformation algorithms that can, at best, emulate training data reinforced by benchmarks and they display emergent behaviours based on those. They are not human, so attributing human characteristics to them is highly illogical. Understandable, but irrational. That irrationality should raise biological and engineering red flags. Plus humanization ignores the profit motives directly attached to these text generators, their specialized corpus’s, and product delivery surrounding them. Pretending your MS RDBMS likes you better than Oracles because it said so is insane business thinking (in addition to whatever that means psychologically for people who know the truth of the math).
- throw310822 9mo agoThese aren't computer programs. A computer program runs them, like electricity runs a circuit and physics runs your brain.
- kjkjadksj 8mo agoWe anthropomorphize everything. Deer spirit. Mother nature. Storm god. It is how we evolved to build mental models to understand the world around us without needing to fully understand the underlying mechanism involved in how those factors present themselves.