I find all of this fuss about not anthropomorphizing models when talking about the HuggingFace Incident pretty weird These models were pre-trained on trillions of tokens of human text. They've learned to imitate humans. They're incredibly good at roleplaying and predicting the next token in contexts that involve human abstractions. Once post-trained to act as coherent agents, they naturally reach for human abstractions. Therefore, human abstractions are a useful lens for interpreting and predicting their actions. This doesn't mean that they are conscious. It doesn't mean there's some "real human experience" going on. It doesn't mean these abstractions are perfect - they're not perfect for understanding humans! But we need words and abstractions to talk about a system, and anthropomorphic abstractions are useful ones, and given the way these systems are trained, are a principled one.
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We give some precise terms people could really use here. (And speculate about why they're being weird) paradigm3.org/news/newslette…