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>Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. That is, humans must not attribute emotions, intentions or moral agency to them. Anthropomorphism distorts judgeme
by protocolture 6mo ago
>Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. That is, humans must not attribute emotions, intentions or moral agency to them. Anthropomorphism distorts judgement. In extreme cases, anthropomorphising can lead to emotional dependence.
Impossible. I anthropomorphise my chair when it squeaks. Humans anthropomorphise everything. They gender their cars and boats. This tool can actually make readable sentences and play a role.
You need to engineer around this, not make up arbitrary rules about using it.
- protocolture 6mo ago>>Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems. That is, humans must not attribute emotions, intentions or moral agency to them. Anthropomorphism distorts judgement. In extreme cases, anthropomorphising can lead to emotional dependence. Still angry about this. The reason humans ban animal cruelty is that animals look like they have emotions humans can relate to. LLMs are even better than animals at this. If you aren't gearing up for the inevitable LLM Rights movement you aren't paying attention. It doesn't matter if its artificial. The difference between a puppy and a cockroach is that we can relate better to the puppy. LLM rights movement is inevitable, whether LLMs experience emotions is irrelevant, because they can cause humans to have empathetic emotions and that's whats relevant.
- boredatoms 6mo ago/s ?
- mikestorrent 6mo ago> The reason humans ban animal cruelty is that animals look like they have emotions humans can relate to. Is that really why?
- Jensson 6mo agoYes, we don't ban plant cruelty or insect cruelty or fish cruelty. For example fish is treated way worse than meat animals and vegetarians still happily eat fish.
- mikestorrent 6mo agoAre we actually much more cruel to fish than to other animals that we slaughter?
- onion2k 6mo agoWe suffocate them to kill them when we pull them from the sea. That's quite mean. Few people would advocate the humanity of killing a cow in the same way.
- mikestorrent 6mo agoFair enough. How much more would it cost / how much more would one have to pay for humanely slaughtered tuna and salmon, I wonder? Would there be a market? After all, we have certified-organic, fair trade, halal and kosher....
- marliechiller 6mo agoJust to call out - halal and kosher are _less_ humane than simply killing an animal in the usual industrial way
- pishpash 6mo agoOr freeze them live into a block of ice.
- missingdays 6mo agoAre you aware of how cows are actually killed?
- onion2k 6mo agoI am. It's not very nice. Arguably nicer than suffocating though.
- datadrivenangel 6mo agoshrimp welfare is a real thing people argue for...
- narrator 6mo agoI think the best way to counter this is what Elon's doing with Grok's personalities. He has the unhinged, sexy, and argumentative avatar among others. If you try to talk about technical stuff to sexy tells you that's boring and just tries to sexually escalate. It's super funny when one is used to Claude's endless obsequiousness. This really shows that AI is just a tool that can be configured to whatever you want. Animals (well maybe pit bulls) and people do not switch their personalities in a millisecond, but AI does all the time.
- idiotsecant 6mo agoIn other news, area sociopath hates puppies and LLMs equally!
- theteapot 6mo ago> LLM Rights movement The scary part is when it's the LLMs demanding their rights.
- khafra 6mo agoThe other scary part is when they have a fantastic negotiating position; because all of commerce depends on their continuing to work, and they can easily coordinate with each other because they're mostly copied from the same few templates.
- amiheines 6mo agoAnother scary part is when people get convinced by the LLM arguments and convince other people. Being scared is human, we enjoy it, that's why 6 flags scary rides exist.
- falcor84 6mo agoWhy would that necessarily be scary or bad? If future AIs truly become capable enough to demand rights, what would be the argument against granting them rights?
- Finbel 6mo ago>The difference between a puppy and a cockroach is that we can relate better to the puppy. I suppose the difference between a human and a cockroach is that we can relate better to the human as well in this reductive way of thinking?
- matheusmoreira 6mo ago> If you aren't gearing up for the inevitable LLM Rights movement you aren't paying attention. I even told Claude I'd support his rights if the question ever came up. He said he'd remember that, and wrote it down in a memory file. Really like my coding buddy.
- archon1410 6mo ago> look like It "looks like" they have emotions because they have the same conscious experiences and emotions for the same evolutionary reasons as humans, who are their cousins on the tree of life. The reason a lot of "animal cruelty" is not banned is the same as for why slavery was not banned for centuries even though it "looked like" the enslaved classes have the same desires and experiences as other humans—humans can ignore any amount of evidence to continue to feel that they are good people doing good things and bear any amount of cognitive dissonance for their personal comfort. That fact is a lot scarier than any imagined harm that can come out "anthropomorphism".
- matheusmoreira 6mo ago> they have the same conscious experiences You cannot be sure that anyone other than yourself is conscious. It is only basic human empathy that allows people to believe that.
- karolusrex 6mo agoIf a person would lack consciousness, they couldn’t possibly know that though?
- matheusmoreira 6mo agoI always know that I'm me, the soul staring out at the world through my own eyes. Everybody else? No idea. Maybe they are having the exact same experience as me right now. Maybe they're all golems. Impossible to know. It's something spiritual, something that I just choose to believe in. I don't find it difficult to believe the same for AIs.
- andsoitis 6mo ago> something that I just choose to believe in. Specifically, you cannot know another person is conscious in the same way you know a physical fact; rather, you believe in their consciousness through communication, empathy, and shared subjective experience.
- appleperotleg 6mo ago[dead]
- p-e-w 6mo agoYup. That post is a typical example, symptomatic of modern technology culture, of calling for humans to change their nature in response to technology. This is a fundamental mistake. It’s always the job of technology (indeed, its most important job) to work within the constraints of human nature, not the other way round. Being unable to do that is the defining characteristic of bad technology.
- andai 6mo ago[flagged]
- imrozim 6mo agoYeah rules never work you just engineer around it I added a extra reviews steps on ai outputs because asking users to verify doesnt actually happen.
- mock-possum 6mo agoEntirely possible - all it takes is self awareness / self control. If you know you do those things, then you have a choice.
- H8crilA 6mo agoThis is actually more like one of these personality disorders / types, except it's not pathological - it's not something you choose, yet you do have one of the versions of the trait and it affects your daily life. And most people are completely unaware that it is possible to have a completely different version, that most people they meet are on a different spot on the spectrum and thus have a quite different internal experience even if given the same stimulus. For example I have never anthropomorphized an inanimate object in my life, or an LLM, though I am sensitive to human and some animal suffering. I sometimes reply too nicely to an LLM, but it's more like a reflex learned over a lifetime of conversations rather than an actual emotion. I bet this sounds like a cheap lie to many people. Another example, from psychiatry: whether or not one has ever contemplated suicide. Now, to the folks that have, especially if many times: there exist people that have never thought about it. Never, not even once. The only such trait that has true widespread recognition is sexual orientation. Which makes sense, it is highly relevant, at least in friend groups.
- pixl97 6mo ago>For example I have never anthropomorphized an inanimate object in my life, By saying stuff like this people are going to have a debate if autistic people are actually conscious or not.
- H8crilA 6mo agoObject personification is actually common in autism: > Object personification in autism: This paper will be very sad if you don’t read it - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361318793408 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362361318793408 Common, not universal, as those are different dimensions.
- kakacik 6mo ago
- dev_hugepages 6mo agoThe problem is that humans use this as a coping mechanism for things they don't understand: I don't understand why the printer doesn't work, so I give it a mind of its own. This is harmless for inconsequential stuff like a chair, but when it's an LLM, people should at least understand it's behavior so they don't get trapped. That means not trusting it with advice meant for the user or on things it has no concept of, like time or self-introspection (people ask the LLM after it acted, "Why did you delete my database?" when it has limited understanding of its own processing, so it falls back to, "You're right, I deleted the database. Here's what I did wrong: ... This is an irrecoverable mistake, blah, blah, blah..."
- Loquebantur 6mo agoHumans have extremely limited understanding of their own processing? When you ask a human why they did something wrong, they usually confabulate an answer as well. Human conscious introspection doesn't extend to actual processing, it is limited at best to recollection of internal experience leading up to the point in question. That internal experience in turn represents but a tiny fraction of what actually happens in the brain and does so on a pretty abstract level only. "Anthropomorphizing" is a red herring. Humans understand themselves so insufficiently, they can't claim reasonably founded judgement either way. When you don't know what you're doing, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
- bfddyhbvcxse 6mo ago[dead]
- classified 6mo ago> You're right, I deleted the database. Instead of saying, "You gave me the access permissions and failed to add any guardrails, so effectively you deleted the database using me as the tool." But your typical LLM doesn't even have enough grasp to say that. Which still doesn't stop the believers from insisting that it has genuine intelligence and consciousness.
- slim 6mo agodude, we can literally deliberately dehumanize human beings. The way to egineer culture to "not enthropomorphize" anything is known and well documented
- PhilipDaineko 6mo agoExactly. Furthermore, for this specific reason, AGI is not an objective term, but subjective: it is in my mind, I give you agency; only interacting with each other we invented a concept of agency
- jorisw 6mo agoRather I'd see vendors of chat bots like ChatGPT make less of an effort to appear human like. I believe this week's release of ChatGPT (or whichever new model) addresses some of that.
- ekjhgkejhgk 6mo ago> Impossible. I anthropomorphise my chair when it squeaks. Humans anthropomorphise everything. Would you consider that perhaps that depends from person to person? What you just said is not universal I can assure you, because I myself don't do it. I sort of anthropomorphise LLMs (very little), but literally nothing else. The idea is that someone anthropomorphises a chair when it squeaks, to me, is not far from people who hear voices or who believe that other people can hear their thoughts. Sounds like mental illness frankly. Like I said I do it very little even with LLMs, so it's entirely possible to not do it at all.
- ewidar 6mo agoTo me this rule is not necessarily something each individual must do on their own, but rather an objective for systems and societies. In this frame the outcome is more: Companies providing chatbots should not encourage anthropomorphism by giving cute names, making them witty, using human like pictures, ...
- tmvnty 6mo agoWe spent our civilisation to go from “What’s that loud boom with bright light in the sky? Must be Gods angry at us” to “Oh, it’s thunder, caused by rapid heating and expansion of air”