4 ms·

I know anthropomorphizing LLMs has been normalized, but holy shit. I hope the language in this article is intentionally chosen for a dramatic effect.

nialse 6mo ago
Agreed. We should not be anthropomorphising LLMs or having them mimic humans.
- Animats 6mo ago
  It's inherent in the way LLMs are built, from human-written texts, that they mimic humans. They have to. They're not solving problems from first principles.
  - nialse 6mo ago
    Maybe we should change that? Of course symbolic AI was the holy grail until statistical AI came in and swept the floor. Maybe something else though.
    - monknomo 6mo ago
      I have the unformed idea that providing a structured interface for the human user overtop the chat interface for the ai, so that the human is not chatting back and forth, could be effective? At least for things that have a structure
  - chrisjj 6mo ago
    They ingest text written in first and third person and regurgitate in first person only, right?
zingar 6mo ago
Fascinating. This is invisible to me, what anthropomorphising did you notice that stood out?
- philipwhiuk 6mo ago
  From the first sentence > I asked an AI agent to solve a programming problem You're not asking it to solve anything. You provide a prompt and it does autocomplete. The only reason it doesn't run forever is that one of the generated tokens is interpreted as 'done'.
  - xeyownt 6mo ago
    What a poor explanation. With the same reasoning, human being are only a bunch of atoms, and the only reason they don't collide with other humans is because of the atomic force. When your abstraction level is too low, it doesn't explain anything, because the system that is built on it is way too complex.
    - chrisjj 6mo ago
      "Autocomplete" is noy an abstraction level. It is the actual programmed behaviour.
      - rcxdude 6mo ago
        At a certain level of abstraction, yes.
      - Jtarii 6mo ago
        You can't understand human behaviour by reading a physics textbook.
        chrisjj 6mo ago
        Of course not. One of the major differences between intelligent and word-guessing autocomplete.
        Jtarii 6mo ago
        Do you think you could explain all AI behaviour by reading a physics textbook?
pjc50 6mo ago
The thing is .. what else can you do? All the advice on how to get results out of LLMs talks in the same way, as if it's a negotiation or giving a set of instructions to a person. You can do a mental or physical search and replace all references to the LLM as "it" if you like, but that doesn't change the interaction.

nialse 6mo ago

Agreed. We should not be anthropomorphising LLMs or having them mimic humans.

Animats 6mo ago
It's inherent in the way LLMs are built, from human-written texts, that they mimic humans. They have to. They're not solving problems from first principles.
- nialse 6mo ago
  Maybe we should change that? Of course symbolic AI was the holy grail until statistical AI came in and swept the floor. Maybe something else though.
  - monknomo 6mo ago
    I have the unformed idea that providing a structured interface for the human user overtop the chat interface for the ai, so that the human is not chatting back and forth, could be effective? At least for things that have a structure
- chrisjj 6mo ago
  They ingest text written in first and third person and regurgitate in first person only, right?

zingar 6mo ago

Fascinating. This is invisible to me, what anthropomorphising did you notice that stood out?

philipwhiuk 6mo ago
From the first sentence > I asked an AI agent to solve a programming problem You're not asking it to solve anything. You provide a prompt and it does autocomplete. The only reason it doesn't run forever is that one of the generated tokens is interpreted as 'done'.
- xeyownt 6mo ago
  What a poor explanation. With the same reasoning, human being are only a bunch of atoms, and the only reason they don't collide with other humans is because of the atomic force. When your abstraction level is too low, it doesn't explain anything, because the system that is built on it is way too complex.
  - chrisjj 6mo ago
    "Autocomplete" is noy an abstraction level. It is the actual programmed behaviour.
    - rcxdude 6mo ago
      At a certain level of abstraction, yes.
    - Jtarii 6mo ago
      You can't understand human behaviour by reading a physics textbook.
      - chrisjj 6mo ago
        Of course not. One of the major differences between intelligent and word-guessing autocomplete.
        Jtarii 6mo ago
        Do you think you could explain all AI behaviour by reading a physics textbook?

pjc50 6mo ago

The thing is .. what else can you do? All the advice on how to get results out of LLMs talks in the same way, as if it's a negotiation or giving a set of instructions to a person. You can do a mental or physical search and replace all references to the LLM as "it" if you like, but that doesn't change the interaction.