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Anthropomorphism in Children's Interactions with LLM Chatbots
- mmooss 2mo agoWhy allow anthropomorphism in LLM or any computer output, for any age group? A simple regulation would be that all LLM output must: * Explicitly identify itself as a computer * Identify the human or human org controlling it (e.g., 'This is Claude v8.90 software made by Anthropic.') * Not attempt to mimic humans except for entertainment purposes, and then clearly labeled (e.g., 'This is not a human. It is a computer pretending to be human for entertainment purposes.'). What violation of those regulations would be for other than defrauding and/or manipulationg people? They are easily complied with and I don't see those regulations impacting the economic productivity gains projected for LLM use.
- ndnichols 2mo agoPreach! Mustafa Suleyman had a great post on some of this last year: https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-conscious-ai-is-coming https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-conscious-ai-is-coming
- pixl97 2mo agoBecause it makes the product mostly useless for all kinds of things?
- mmooss 2mo agoWhat things? Again, I don't see any but manipulation and fraud, but I certainly could be missing some.
- all2 2mo agoRole play, which is a huge consumer of tokens. You can glance at openrouter's usage stats and see what apps tokens are going to and what the inference content was classified as. It's quite revealing.
- estearum 2mo agoYeah, the costs of that use case far outweigh the benefits.
- selectodude 2mo agoLike online gambling, some things cause more harm than good.
- mmooss 2mo agoHow would that regulation interfere with role play? Role play is 'play'; people know what it is. It shouldn't interfere with immersion: People suspend disbelief in movie theaters or reading books, despite knowing it's a film or novel. The risk with AI is that people don't understand what an LLM is.
- windexh8er 2mo agoCare to enlighten us? Because you seem to imply you want to have a conversation about your day every time you fire up a shell.
- 4b11b4 2mo agoWhat world are you living in, I don't want to go there
- ericol 2mo agoI don't need a computer to mimic a human. AT ALL As a matter of fact, for the line of work I do (programming, devops, the works) being conscious about the fact that I am just getting an algorithm outputting text that is probabilistically related to the input I gave it would actually be healthy for me and my mental state. I HATE having to say "you" when working with an LLM.
- marcus_holmes 2mo agoI have the same urge - third-person the LLM is an it, for sure, but I'm not aware of a suitable second-person construction for talking to things. Maybe we need to invent one.
- wpm 2mo agoWhen yelling at the other appliances I own, "you" usually turns into "you fucker" or "you useless piece of shit", so I stick with what I know. "Claude, you useless piece of shit, I already told you..."
- marcus_holmes 2mo agoAlways loved the tweet: "I don't know what machine they were raging against, but I'm pretty sure it was a printer" [paraphrased]. We could definitely update that. I'm Australian, so "oi cunt" works about as well as "you" for most things, though I'm not suggesting we adopt that formally.
- ericol 2mo agook that cracked me. Could be worth of an update: I don't know what machine they were raging against, but I'm pretty sure it was an LLM
- mmooss 2mo agoDon't say 'you'? One solution is to use commands (imperatives), as you've always done with computers. For example, instead of 'you are an expert in Lisp', say 'function as an expert in Lisp.' Are there use cases where that isn't applicable.
- BrenBarn 2mo agoI'd say making LLMs useless would be a net positive for humanity.
- 4b11b4 2mo agoSeriously: for the sake of all future children, the elderly, and everyone in between
- dpark 2mo agoThis sounds like the kind of well-intentioned thinking that results in products that are no safer practically but are far more unpleasant to interact with. This is like the pop up every time I start my car that reminds me I should not play with the screen while I’m driving.
- mmooss 2mo agoWould you give examples of possible negative results, especially those that outweigh the benefits? Do you have ideas on how to do it better? > like the pop up every time I start my car that reminds me I should not play with the screen while I’m driving. If something like that is the worst result, there is little downside.
- dpark 2mo agoThe downside is it’s annoying as hell. The upside seems limited to a bureaucratic pat on the back for “doing something good”.
- victorbjorklund 2mo agoWhat does it even mean ”do not mimick humans”? How are the AI supposed to reply if I ask ”do you think this genserver will be a bottleneck in the sync process and how can we fix it?” The correct answer would sound just like a human unless you either make it do shallow annoying stuff like add redundant ”as an LLM I can’t think or recommend but the answer with the highest probability is …”
- marcus_holmes 2mo agoIsn't this about children attributing human characteristics onto the LLM, rather than the LLM itself pretending to be human? And we do this with lots of things that are not human for children (e.g. Bluey and Peppa Pig). Do we need a "this is not a human" warning for them, too?
- estearum 2mo agoDo Bluey and Peppa Pig produce convincing human-like responses to virtually any human-generated input directed towards them? If so, then uhh yeah we should definitely regulate that shit
- marcus_holmes 2mo agoIf not now, then soon, yes. I'll bet money there's a toy manufacturer somewhere working out how to hook a Bluey doll up to an LLM to make it responsive. I'm not completely clear on what we're afraid of here, though. We routinely project human-like characteristics onto non-human things for our children. We don't think this is harmful. Why are we worried about children projecting human characteristics onto an LLM?
- estearum 2mo agoObviously the people who think LLMs should be forbidden from this use-case would think it should be forbidden from put-it-in-a-doll use-case. We routinely give our children ibuprofen or acetaminophen, this does not imply that some vicodin or oxycontin would be fine. I think it's a reasonable assumption that a fundamental skill of being a good social creature (which we know to be absolutely critical to good human health) is to be able to distinguish between human and non-human. Or more generally conscious and non-conscious. You are basing your opinion off of e.g. anthropomorphizing cars or dolls which 1) are obviously not human, and 2) rely on the fairly intense imagination of the anthropomorphizer to "work." Once the imagination stops, the anthropomorphization stops. In contrast, LLMs successfully delude even intelligent adults into anthropomorphizing them. This is especially problematic for a generation of humans that grow up where most of their human-to-human communication happens intermediated by technology, i.e. LLM-originated interaction looks more human every day, but also human-originated interaction looks more LLM- (or technology-)originated every day too. We've been living with this pathology for a while now in the form of people treating those humans on the other side of a chatbox vastly worse than they would ever treat a human face to face. Now this is chewing away at the distinction from the other end too.
- tolugenius 2mo agoI'm curious what specific chatbots they used, a companion chatbot is quite different than say chatgpt. And I imagine the former is what children will anthropomorphize, my understand is chatgpt/gemini/the standard is more "do my homework" services. I am curious if the same mechanisms they found with children are the same or at least on the same thread line with the adults who found companions or attachment with certain models (like the gpt 4o saga).
- wpenman 2mo agoIn section 4.2 they have a figure with the models that each of the studies used that they analyzed. Overwhelmingly (28/36) it was a GPT model. Top 4 use cases for the apps were self-directed information seeking, co-authoring stories with AI, teaching science through dialogue, and eliciting children's emotional expression.
- mncharity 2mo agoSimilar issues arose with automated learning companions for XR. Mismatches between a learner's mental model of the companion, and its actual capabilities and limitations, can cause so many problematic misunderstandings. So one idea, is to emphasize non-human non-social sources of behavior - to set up alternative narratives for "why did it do that?". The companion might be "Sparky, the glitching robot dog". So forgetting things, getting them wrong, spacing out, being unhelpful, confused, distracted, missing social cues, giving poor cues, etc... that's just glitchy robot dog glitching, not social signal. Maybe - speculative.
- lz400 2mo agoWhen my daughter was 7yo and she talked to chatgpt, she repeatedly asked, what's your name? are you a boy or a girl? eventually she lost interest at the evasiveness of the answers, like she marked it as not fun to interact with, not a real person. It's different now, that she understands it can help with homework :D
- songhonglei1985 2mo ago[flagged]
- makeyouragent 2mo ago[flagged]
- cainxinth 2mo agoWhen my niece was very young, I showed her my Polaris pool cleaner. It’s a simple contraption. Just some hoses attached to a small box with a few wheels. It rolls around the pool, sucking up leaves on the bottom. She took it all in, and then turned to me and asked: “Is that robot’s family living in the ocean?”