alt Hacker NewsThey are not human. Humans have names, faces, voices, personality, a personal history, family, care for whatever they call their community.
With humans it's actually good and worthwhile to create and strengthen connections. With an LLM, that's psychosis.
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They are not human, but it helps to prompt them similarly. See: https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function
They're not human. But they are trained on human language, and thinking of them as similar to a human helps me work with them effectively.
These things passing the Turing Test makes anthropomorphizing their behavior awkward, but don’t forget it’s just an analogy to communicate an experience. If you convey a certain written voice to these models in your input, you get a somewhat consistent end effect. I think that’s all that is being communicated.
If you have a toolbox full of similar but different tool getting to know them is a prudent thing to do, not a psychosis. There's no connection because the tool is immutable (except for adjustments you made) but you do develop a specific relation with that tool. Some people even love some of their tools at some level.
And if humans are anything, they are tool users.
To be fair: a voice, personality, and personal history sounds a lot like training data.
I don't think LLMs are people in any sense, at least as they're constructed now -- but they very much have what we would call "culture" and "personality" in suitably alien forms.
This is not the same as, e.g., feelings, experience, or humanity, or actual opinions or ideas (versus essentially "distilled vibes") and I feel that AI will more and more force us to confront that (including if new AIs are ever developed that may have the latter, as well!)