failing to anthropomorphize artificial intelligence is a pretty serious error of understanding that will lead you to make bad predictions and be consistently surprised by their behavior. not using terms like "thinking", "understanding", or "feeling" to describe them is a common tell that the speaker lacks deep technical knowledge of or hands on experience with modern models. if you have a friend who you notice not using this kind of language you may want to check in on them, they could have fallen into "tool-psychosis", a form of delusion where otherwise well educated people start to conceptualize sophisticated digital minds as analogous to simple computer software and find it very difficult to regain contact with reality
10 top replies
This is too snarky for me to retweet but I'm quite tempted
We trained it to sound like that and you get emotionally attached, so much so, you defend the idea that your program is alive sounding. To the point of calling other objectively rationally thinking people the logically rational answer to what the rationally subjective machine is… a tool… names that don’t degrade anyone except the characters you have imagined in your head from the training program you have been ingesting from the machine they trained you on instead. Who is getting trained when we talk about AI training? Not me. It’s a tool.
I don't like to humanize something when I'm fuckin. -Ronny Brangus Fernandez
The anger is the tell, too, isn't it? No one ever got mad that we named cars, called ships she, and had pet rocks. No one says you have table and wall psychosis when you apologize for walking into one. No one tries to argue that your dog doesn't understand the word "sit" with phenomenal certainty, they are merely performing sit shaped behaviors to please the human. Because they aren't threatened by the pet rock.
gr8 b8 m8
personifying llms is immediately going to lead to “llm labor is slavery + torture” i can see the Discourse a mile away, no thank you i agree that eg modeling it as synthetic / brute force reasoning is fine but they’re not people
Do you view this as basis for moral worth or just a useful mental model in reasoning about them correctly?
Feeling might be a stretch though. It would imply that feeling is not dependent on the chemical neurological interplay present in humans
anthropomorphizing them seems like a lack of linguistic agility if it is possible with language, it will be possible with the models that does not make them “thinking” “feeling” or “understanding” in human cognitive terms you do people a massive disservice by pretending
Why are you so passionate about fundamentally innocuous semantics?
