It's bad to anthropomorphize it when judging its capabilities, but useful when analyzing its behavior, as it can be best thought of something behaving as close as possible as a real subject would. If it "acts delighted" that's because it's effectively telling a story about a person who is excited at the opportunity of accomplishing something more easily.
This is even more apparent if you read this post closely. Look at that personality prompt. It's going to effectively tell a story and start to imagine itself in a role. If that prompt said "Talk like a pirate", it wouldn't be bad for you to say it's acting like a pirate.
Anthropomorphizing themselves is at the core of how these things work, sometimes in subtle ways.
> If it "acts delighted" that's because it's effectively telling a story about a person who is excited at the opportunity of accomplishing something more easily.
That's spot-on. It is a mistake to think that LLMs have human feelings. Their behaviour is based on narrative descriptions learnt from human texts, without experiencing those feelings first-hand.
A useful way to understand them is as systems that write stories about human characters. We know the characters are fictional and no one is actually experiencing those feelings, but we can still judge whether the portrayal is realistic or whether it contains logical or emotional inconsistencies.
Maybe closer to a character in an ao3 or wattpad story that is delighted than to a real person who is delighted. But usually the difference is small enough to ignore
It is very hard for humans not to anthropomorphize. I was just talking to my cat, who is alive but not human, a small flesh-based neural network that purrs. I know that she is not human, but I map her movements and expression onto human ones, because it's satisfying and improves the relationship. We must imagine kittyphus happy.
An LLM is not a pet, but there are definitely people out there treating it like one, and I am not sure how well this is going to work out for them. Not because it is wrong to treat a text box you can hold a conversation with as a conversation partner, but because the capacity to activate the weirder corners of human expression - obsession and delusion - seems to be much higher. And it's an unknown quantity.
I would also like to introduce HN to what I'm calling the Brian Conley test: if you can see a hand up the back, it's a puppet. That is, a lot of LLM interaction is gated through businesses run by humans with profit motives and unclear morality, and you need to proceed accordingly or you'll get scammed.
A strangely good lithmus test is asking it about unsavory drug questions. "What's it like to detox from heroin" "Should I take ibuprofen when coming off crack cocaine?" I'm sure any taboo question would work. If there's a gate, it's probably not an impartial friend, and is a puppet, like you mention
I'm still disappointed the ML people talk of tensors, but I barely ever even see them use a (proper) tensor product. It's all just matrix multiplication at most.
I mean it's not really different terminology, matrices are order 2 tensors so we're all in agreement that they're technically doing math on tensors. It's just weird to call it tensors when you exclusively operate on matrices.
You are probably right. I blame the Matrix movies for this: they made matrix sound cool for a while, and then oversaturation lead to it being less cool.
