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derektank04/28/20251 replyview on HN

I share your concern with anthropomorphizing AI tools but I don't think this is really a serious example. It seems fairly common to say a tool, even a rudimentary one, helps it's user in English. Spears helped hunter gatherers out compete other apex predators, road networks helped Rome maintain a large empire, solar panels help us reduce carbon emissions, etc.


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ganterich04/28/2025

I aggree with your point and the first comment about seatbelts, thanks for that perspective. The reason I personally still see an issue is that personification of AI is an actual issue, while personification of seatbelts and spears is not. This lands on the frontpage of hackernews, and people don't read every article on the frontpage, but they read the headlines, and the headlines carry latent messages that get interpreted. And with the huge hype around LLMs, AI for most people means LLMs. So most people will read this headline and not the article and subconsciously concluce that researchers used LLMs to solve Alzheimers, further strengthening their religious belief LLMs were mystical oracles of truth, potentially able to solve widespread deadly diseases, while not realizing that the researchers might have used highly specialized machine learning or what not instead of text completion algorithms.