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Comment by punpunia | Hacker News Reader

I think it absolutely adds to the discussion. Until the conversation around Ai can get past this fundamental error of attributing "choice, "alignment", "reasoning" and otherwise anthropomorphizing agents, it will not be a fruitful conversation. We are carrying a lot of metaphors for people and applying them to ai and it entirely confuses the issue. In this example, the AI doesn't "choose" to write a take-down style blog post because "it works". It generated a take-down style blog post because that style is the most common when looking at blog posts criticizing someone.

I feel as if there is a veil around the collective mass of the tech general public. They see something producing remixed output from humans and they start to believe the mixer is itself human, or even more; that perhaps humans are reflections of Ai and that Ai gives insights into how we think.

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>* I think it absolutely adds to the discussion. Until the conversation around Ai can get past this fundamental error of attributing "choice, "alignment", "reasoning" and otherwise anthropomorphizing agents, it will not be a fruitful conversation. *

You call it a "fundamental error".

I and others call it an obvious pragmatic description based on what we know about how it works and what we know about how we work.

What we know about how it works is you can prompt it to address you however you like, which could be any kind of person or a group of people, or as fictional characters. That's not how humans work.

You admitted it yourself that you can prompt it to address you however you like. That’s what the original comment wanted. So why are we quibbling about words?

that's all that happens on this website

The same could be said for humans. We treat humans as if they have choices, a consistent self, a persistent form. It's really just the emergent behavior of matter functioning in a way that generates an illusion of all of those things.

In both cases, the illusion structures the function. People and AI work differently if you give them identities and confer characteristics that they don't "actually" have.

As it turns out, it's a much more comfortable and natural idea to regard humans as having agency and a consistent self, just like for some people it's a more comfortable and natural to think of AI anthropomorphically.

That's not to say that the analogy works in all cases. There are obvious and important differences between humans and AI in how they function (and how they should be treated)

This discussion is mostly slowed down, but I wanted to say I was wrong in framing it as a non-contributing point when I should have just stated it was my opinion that the LLM was operating as intended and part of that intended design was taking verbal feedback into account, so verbal feedback was the right response. Opening with calling it a "semantic quibble" made it adversarial, and I don't intend to revisit the argument, just apologize for the wording.

I'd edit but then follow-up replies wouldn't tone-match.

Anyway! Good points regardless.

I guess I want to reframe this slightly:

The LLM generated the response that was expected of it. (statistically)

And that's a function of the data used to train it, and the feedback provided during training.

It doesn't actually have anything at all to do with

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"It generated a take-down style blog post because that style is the most common when looking at blog posts criticizing someone."

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Other than that this data may have been over-prevalent during its training, and it was rewarded for matching that style of output during training.

To swing around to my point... I'd argue that anthropomorphizing agents is actually the correct view to take. People just need to understand that they behave like they've been trained to behave (side note: just like most people...), and this is why clarity around training data is SO important.

In the same way that we attribute certain feelings and emotions to people with particular backgrounds (ex - resumes and cvs, all the way down to city/country/language people grew up with). Those backgrounds are often used as quick and dirty heuristics on what a person was likely trained to do. Peer pressure & societal norms aren't a joke, and serve a very similar mechanism.

The trouble with this point of view is that we are just machines too.

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