alt Hacker News> They are infinitely patient, infinitely available, and unbelievably knowledgeable, it really is miraculous.
This is a strange way to talk about a computer program following its programming. I see no miracle here.
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I feel like I’ve seen more and more people recently fall for this trick. No, LLMs are not “empathetic” or “patient”, and no, they do not have emotions. They’re incredibly huge piles of numbers following their incentives. Their behavior convincingly reproduces human behavior, and they express what looks like human emotions… because their training data is full of humans expressing emotions? Sure, sometimes it’s helpful for their outputs to exhibit a certain affect or “personality”. But falling for the act, and really attributing human emotions to them seems, is alarming to me.
Chatting with an LLM resembles chatting with a person.
A human might be "empathetic", "infinitely patient, infinitely available". And (say) a book or a calculator is infinitely available. -- When chatting with an LLM, you get an interface that's more personable than a calculator without being less available.
I know the LLM is predicting text, & outputting whatever is most convincing. But it's still tempting to say "thank you" after the LLM generates a response which I found helpful.