alt Hacker NewsI always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects. Anyway I always had a pet theory that the reason some people are fooled into thinking LLM text output is a real human with feelings, and some aren't, comes down to this difference in brains. (Personally I never feel like the LLM is a real human and I'm kind of autistic too.)
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> I always had the impression it was the other way around, non autistic 'normal' people personifies non human objects.
The paper says, they do!
The surprising part is that autist do it too, at approximately the same rates, which was unexpected.
Some scientists believe that autistic people have different levels of empathy than allistic people. Sometimes this manifests as higher levels of empathy for objects and animals, or higher emotional empathy.
I'm dx'd autistic, and I am someone who will weep openly or experience unbridled joy alongside, say, a movie about a bunch of animals surviving tough times. But if I see an adult human make a poor choice and suffer consequences I feel nothing. I have to teach myself that my values are that we should care for everyone -- even the people I feel no intrinsic empathy towards.
In speaking with my doc about it, it's apparently not at all uncommon for autistic folks to have this sort of extremely strong empathy response in some cases, while a totally flat empathy response in others.
I'm not fooled whatsoever into thinking LLMs are human, but I am polite in how I interact with them because the language that I use impacts my experience. Same goes with how I interact with anything, linguistically or not.
The normal version is anthropomorphizing - projecting humanity onto something (state of mind, emotions, reactions).
The autistic version is interpreting the state of objects emotionally, which is closer to synesthesia.
The normal version is practice for interacting with people, the autistic version is consuming emotional attention that could otherwise be used for people.
I think there's different kinds of autism, which imv, you could spread across a schizophrenia axis -- "low reality" and "high reality" sorts. My own classification system:
The more schizophrenic kind imparts a fantasy framing on everything which can give rise to a disorganised imparting of mental capacities that I think is fairly uniform across objects, including people. This appears as "too few mental capacities" on people, and too much to objects. This a "living in their own world, dreaming" type. Dreamer-type.
At the other extreme, it's a difficulty in establishing any kind of fantasy framing (without significant support, eg., in video games / films). This is an officious, "the rules really exist, and we must follow them" type. Officious-type.
Incidentally, imv, there's a third sort you might call dissociative, where irony is the main mode of relation to the world and others. This is an unstable blending of the two perspectives: the ironic performative frame is at once a kind of fantasy, but a sort of fantasy which seeks to make the very adopting of fantasy impossible. Irony-type.
I think quite a lot of "high-engagement culture" (ie., the type which requires a lot of its audience) is really autistic culture of these varieties in interaction.