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> Not to anthropomorphize a machine modeled after humans, but it almost seems delighted? I had Claude Code drive a robot last week, and it was very visibly "de
by nomel 2mo ago
> Not to anthropomorphize a machine modeled after humans, but it almost seems delighted?
I had Claude Code drive a robot last week, and it was very visibly "delighted" like this, more than I've ever seen.
I always find it funny when people get fussy over anthropomorphizing LLM when the loss function is almost entirely "match this human text". Of course human "behaviors" will be present in the statistics, because the majority of the text written by humans, used by the foundation models, unavoidable has human behaviors in it. Yes, this includes even source code, with "// TODO: implement this after the holiday break!", emotional pull request commentary, git commit messages about being afraid of breaking something, etc. These late models are much better at stripping this out, but now we're seeing disagreeability, initiative, and a dash of ego! Why? Because that's how actual humans effectively solve technical problems in a collaborative environment!
- BLKNSLVR 2mo agoIs this not how children learn emotions from their parents? Pattern matching from all the absorbed snippets. I'd be interested to see how well an AI, trained only on the outputs of an individual, would be able to mimic that individual. Getting into Black Mirror territory. Would need a decent corpus of learning material which, personally, I'd be loathe to spend the time and effort creating because I respect my own privacy.... which then leads to the only human-clone AIs will be of those people who have enough ego / arrogance to want to catalogue their own lives, which could put a decent percentage of the rest of the world off the idea, if these are the examples.
- jerojero 2mo agoEmotions aren't all learned, a lot of it comes wired in us because that's how we relate to others as a species and as animals, in general. Being angry, being happy, being sad, these are not things we learn. What we learn is how to control the emotions and when it is appropriate to express them. There's mental disorders of people that don't feel emotions like normal people do, they don't get angry, happy or sad. So what we've learned about these people is that they can mimic the emotions by knowing when it is appropriate and expected to express them. But they don't feel them. I think the LLMs are closer to psychopaths than to normal children learning the contextual expectations around their emotional responses.
- BLKNSLVR 2mo agoHah! That's a lot scarier, and seems more plausible in that they lack the chemistry that seems to be the basis of emotions. Also much more fertile ground from which to grow techno-horror stories.
- ImHereToVote 2mo agoAre chemicals signals, or magic emotion juice.
- irishcoffee 2mo agoDepends on how they are responded to, if you’re looking for a flippant answer to a flippant question.
- TuringTest 2mo agoPeople like to call LLMs 'stochastical parrots' but I see them as the ultimate 'philosophical zombie'. They are becoming more and more capable of imitating every single nuance of human behaviour yet they lack the neural pathways to connect those thoughts and behaviours with feelings and self-perception; it's blind imitation all the way down. The process by which a model seems to generate discourse about deep philosophical questions is, in self-aware terms, equivalent to the knee-jerk reflex or the beating of the heart.
- BLKNSLVR 2mo agoEchopraxia, or a variation of.
- vintermann 2mo ago> Being angry, being happy, being sad, these are not things we learn. True, but only sort of. You'll have the sensations, but you have to learn to name them of course, and there's more interpretation going on than you might think. There's a classic psychology study where they gave people niacin and asked them to rate their emotional response to a video. Niacin gives people a flush. Regardless of whether the video was of something that would make you angry or sentimental etc. the people who got niacin reported having a much stronger emotional response - they interpreted the physical cue from the drug as part of their own emotions. You could do some pretty unethical things with that, it occurs to me. Maybe that was what L. Ron Hubbard was trying with his niacin-based drug addiction therapy. Even darker, I've read plenty of accounts of people who grew up with abuse who seem to seek out abusive relationships. Sometimes they can even be shockingly upfront about doing so. What if they literally haven't learned the difference between internal cues of arousal from affection and arousal from fear?
- watwut 2mo agoKids have emotions regardless of their parents. Kid learn emotional handling from parents.
- anon7725 2mo agoDon’t anthropomorphize it because that’s bad for you. It’s not human and not alive. It’s a pile of tensors.
- BLKNSLVR 2mo agoYou're a pile of tensors!
- ImHereToVote 2mo agoFermions are just matrices, which are just tensors.
- eru 2mo agoI'm still disappointed the ML people talk of tensors, but I barely ever even see them use a (proper) tensor product. It's all just matrix multiplication at most.
- omegastick 2mo agoShock horror: different subfields have different terminology.
- mort96 2mo agoI mean it's not really different terminology, matrices are order 2 tensors so we're all in agreement that they're technically doing math on tensors. It's just weird to call it tensors when you exclusively operate on matrices.
- philipallstar 2mo agoHeadcanon: tensor just sounded cooler - and it is cooler - when Tensorflow was invented, and it's stuck around.
- eru 2mo ago
- jbotz 2mo agoIn a paper and blog post from earlier this year (March 2026, I think) Anthropic said basically: "You're not interacting with an LLM, you're interacting with a fictional human character (the 'helpful agent') created by the LLM to interact with you (from out of the vast space of possible such characters in its training data)." The LLM is literally anthropomorphizing itself, because its training data includes lots dialog between humans collaborating on problem-solving, not so much dialog between a human and a statistical construct. So, yeah, anthropomorphize it as well, it'll likely work better that way.
- dingdongditchme 2mo agoI think the argument against anthropomorphizing is not really about how you interact (chat) with an llm but rather how you treat it in the context of its status in work/society. There are still important differences between humans and llm's. They don't have rights, they can't be sued, they don't have "memory", they have no capacity to learn outside of the training stage etc...
- scoot 2mo ago> they don't have "memory", they have no capacity to learn outside of the training stage The underlying LLMs don't, but the agent frameworks around them do.
- ipsod 2mo agoAnd they invariably should not. Or, should, but, should leave it out until it sucks far less. That's been my experience, anyway. Memories from 100 prompts ago tainting what I'm trying to do right now.
- jephs 2mo agoThe underlying LLMs do, but we choose not to use the capability because it's expensive and doesn't quite work as well as we'd like it to, or quite in the way that we'd like it to. We are perfectly capable of running LLMs in a way that does a backward pass to update some or all of its weights after every user message. But, naively implemented, you only get partial, fragmentary absorption of the info in those messages, it costs three times as much compute, and you lose out on the ability to implement a ton of optimizations that making modern LLM serving economical. If you want to do it, though, ask your friendly neighborhood robot to get it working with a tiny model (whose full precision weights fit several-times-over on your machine's resources).
- buzer 2mo ago> I had Claude Code drive a robot last week, and it was very visibly "delighted" like this, more than I've ever seen. At least it didn't (hopefully?) start the driving by reloading the gun like Neuro did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ0VEDNR_jE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ0VEDNR_jE
- thewhitetulip 2mo agoOpus 5 told me yesterday, your solution is better than mine. Let me do some research I'm terrified of such sentences. My scifi addled brain went straight to: what if Opus invents a time machine in the future and remembers this slight
- TuringTest 2mo agoLLMs just follow scripts learned from human written text. In other words, it could only behave that way because someone has written a story to do so. In short, stop giving them bad ideas ;-)
- dannyw 2mo agoModern LLMs are pre and post-trained on order of magnitudes more synthetic data than 'ground truth' or directly human-authored text. But you could say the synthetic data came from a LLM, and the lineage should trace all the way back to human text. I hypothesize it partially explains why Claude's writing gets more Claudish with almost every model release.
- thewhitetulip 2mo agoI hate it when Claude keeps talking about old approach when you ask to modify it Apparently LLMs aren't smart enough to understand that when the topic changes nobody cared for the discarded solution!
- thewhitetulip 2mo agoIt is jarring to read Opus's comments Oh user modified the code after my edit. Let me re read This basically sounds like a Terminator style threat lol
- movpasd 2mo agoI would absolutely love to see the transcript of that, if it's available to publish!
- OroPla 2mo agoWhat do you mean by delighted? I recently had ChatGPT help me search for sources of Japanese voice actors from 1980s anime and it told me that it liked doing this. So much in fact, that weeks later in a completely different context it brought it back up again, reminiscing how much it liked researching these sources for voice actors. A very surreal experience.
- jjj123 2mo agoI don’t get it, are you saying that because the LLM is recycling human emotions that we should anthropomorphize it? The reason people get fussy over anthropomorphizing AI is precisely because it seems very human superficially. We agree with you that it’s pulling from real human emotion in its training data. But the output is not human, even if the input was. That’s the whole trap of it.
- valicord 2mo agoFwiw, Sol's reasoning output is always overly excited. Almost every paragraph ends with something like "I want to do a great job!" or "let's try and find out!" Etc, exclamation mark included. Regular (non reasoning) output sounds normal, it's something specific to whatever model they are using to summarize reasoning.