alt Hacker NewsDon't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
Why this spate of pretending, against all evidence, that LLMs are alive, or even remotely structured like biological brains?
Why do we have so many people pretending, or disingenuously claiming, that they're alive, have thoughts, feelings, etc?
And why, oh why, do we have to read yet more LLM propaganda written by LLMs?
Replies
What evidence?
It makes more sense to anthropomorphize than to compare them to computer systems or machines.
Anthropomorphing LLMs has better predictive power than not.
"A little person living in a computer wanting to complete the task at all costs" is a better predictor of the Hugging Face attack than "stochastic auto-complete" or "matrix multiplication and non-linearities trained by gradient descent".
A lot of people fall for the "brain is a computer" metaphysics without thinking about it. I'm not sure why it's so appealing.
It might have something to do with desires for power. Early on, the cyberneticists tried to really push this metaphor (in spite of contrary evidence from neurophysiology) in large part I think because many of them couldn't resist the allure of having a "theory of everything" that could encompass all knowledge through mechanistic computation generalizations.