alt Hacker News> He’s not necessarily anthropomorphizing it, he’s showing that it went against every instruction he gave it.
It's deeper than that, there are two pitfalls here which are not simply poetic license.
1. When you submit the text "Why did you do that?", what you want is for it to reveal hidden internal data that was causal in the past event. It can't do that, what you'll get instead is plausible text that "fits" at the end of the current document.
2. The idea that one can "talk to" the LLM is already anthropomorphizing on a level which isn't OK for this use-case: The LLM is a document-make-bigger machine. It's not the fictional character we perceive as we read the generated documents, not even if they have the same trademarked name. Your text is not a plea to the algorithm, your text is an in-fiction plea from one character to another.
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P.S.: To illustrate, imagine there's this back-and-forth iterative document-growing with an LLM, where I supply text and then hit the "generate more" button:
1. [Supplied] You are Count Dracula. You are in amicable conversation with a human. You are thirsty and there is another delicious human target nearby, as well as a cow. Dracula decides to
2. [Generated] pounce upon the cow and suck it dry.
3. [Supplied] The human asks: "Dude why u choose cow LOL?" and Dracula replies:
4. [Generated] "I confess: I simply prefer the blood of virgins."
What significance does that #4 "confession" have?
Does it reveal a "fact" about the fictional world that was true all along? Does it reveal something about "Dracula's mind" at the moment of step #2? Neither, it's just generating a plausible add-on to the document. At best, we've learned something about a literary archetype that exists as statistics in the training data.
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Why is this getting downvoted? This is exactly what’s going on here. The LLM has no idea why it did what it did. All it has to go on is the content of the session so far. It doesn’t ‘know’ any more than you do. It has no memory of doing anything, only a token file that it’s extending. You could feed that token file so far into a completely different LLM and ask that, and it would also just make up an answer.
I agree to the practical part of this, with two nuances:
The full data of what's in an LLM's "consciousness" is the conversation context. Just because it isn't hidden, doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't contain information you've overlooked.
Asking "why did you do that" won't reveal anything new, but it might surface some amount of relevant information (or it hallucinates, it depends which LLM you're using). "Analyse recent context and provide a reasonable hypothesis on what went wrong" might do a bit better. Just be aware that llm hypotheses can still be off quite a bit, and really need to be tested or confirmed in some manner. (preferably not by doing even more damage)
Just because you shouldn't anthropomorphize, doesn't mean an english capable LLM doesn't have a valid answer to an english string; it just means the answer might not be what you expected from a human.