Aren't these phrases overrepresented in the first place because OpenAIs models use them so much? I guess Llama picked up the habit by consuming GPT output.
It’s software, not an “I”.
Command prompts don't get asked questions like "What do you think about [topic]?" and have to generate a response based on their study of human-written texts.
E.g. 'File not found' vs 'Sorry I could not find the file you were looking for.' Same stuff, but one just adds an artificial and unnecessary anthropomorphization.
It anthropromorphizes itself.
In your example:
-- "iteration over filenames table reaches end → file not found";
-- "non-deterministic choice over lookup strategy does not return a positive → sorry I could not find the item"
Most of the software I use doesn't need to refer it itself in the first person. Pretending what we're speaking with an agent is more of a UX/marketing decision rather than a technical/logical constraint.
It isn't an experiment I have the resources or the knowledge to run, but I hope someone does and reports the results.
The only time an LLM should ask questions is to clarify information. A word processor doesn’t want to chit chat about what I’m writing about, nor should an LLM.
Unless it is specifically playing an interactive role of some sort like a virtual friend.
On the other hand, asking useful questions can help prevent hallucinations or clarify tasks. If you're going spawn off an hour long task, asking a few questions first can make a huge difference.
When an LLM says "honestly", it's just stupid. An LLM can't "lie".
Of course if you tink of the computer as a person you get strange results. A compiler error isn't the compiler telling me anything. It's the compiler writer telling me something. So a compiler error might contain a joke, and the joke might make sense, although obviously computers and compilers don't have a sense of humour.
I definitely think of them as "I"s, but that just always came naturally to me, at least going back to thinking about how Ghandi would act against me in Civ 1.