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Comment by maxbond | Hacker News Reader

> You think it's irresponsible to anthropomorphize software which iterated through versions of itself until it was best able to model and extrapolate the largest trove of anthropomorphic training data to date?

I must've missed the part where the models began iterating under their own power? I think this is why we should avoid anthropomorphizing - we're one sentence into your remarks, and we've already departed from the facts in evidence in a material way.

I don't think it's so much about what is responsible than what it consistent and rigorous. Anthropomorphizing subtly begs the question and causes us to lose perspective on what the models can and can't do today. It also encourages us to reason about how the models through our intuitions about how people work and learn, which is very unlikely to be an accurate reflection of the model.

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You think back propagation isn't an iterative process?

I'm not saying that it was being done in some willful manner by the model.

You reading into that seems more a phenomenon of people so anxious around anthropomorphizing that they see it everywhere they look.

Let's compare these statements.

> You think it's irresponsible to anthropomorphize a model developed by a team of researchers using backpropogation to fit the model to a large corpus of text?

Do you see how framing it as "software iterating through versions of itself" gives the model agency that makes it seem more human? And how calling it "anthropomorphic data" presupposes that this is data that, when trained on, results in something anthropomorphic?

This isn't something I'm reading in I'm afraid, these decisions about how to frame the problem influence the conclusions we come to. It's implicitly taking some very strong priors before the process has begun.

I don't have any anxiety about this, I am just telling you from one human being to another, these cognitive biases exist and will foil your efforts to understand this phenomenon if not accounted for. I'm not suggesting anything apocalyptic or hysterical here, I'm just saying you're more likely to end up at the wrong conclusion than the right one if you anthropomorphize AI models.

> I must've missed the part where the models began iterating under their own power

He's probably referring to AlphaGo/AlphaZero in that sentence

I don't think AlphaGo was trained on the "largest trove of anthropomorphic training data," and the rest of the remarks are about GPT, but I'm open to having misread.

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