Anthropomorphism in Children's Interactions with LLM Chatbots
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
She took it all in, and then turned to me and asked: “Is that robot’s family living in the ocean?”
A simple regulation would be that all LLM output must:
* Explicitly identify itself as a computer
* Identify the human or human org controlling it
(e.g., 'This is Claude v8.90 software made by Anthropic.')
* Not attempt to mimic humans except for entertainment
purposes, and then clearly labeled (e.g., 'This is not
a human. It is a computer pretending to be human for
entertainment purposes.').
It shouldn't interfere with immersion: People suspend disbelief in movie theaters or reading books, despite knowing it's a film or novel. The risk with AI is that people don't understand what an LLM is.
As a matter of fact, for the line of work I do (programming, devops, the works) being conscious about the fact that I am just getting an algorithm outputting text that is probabilistically related to the input I gave it would actually be healthy for me and my mental state.
I HATE having to say "you" when working with an LLM.
"Claude, you useless piece of shit, I already told you..."
I'm Australian, so "oi cunt" works about as well as "you" for most things, though I'm not suggesting we adopt that formally.
I don't know what machine they were raging against, but I'm pretty sure it was an LLMOne solution is to use commands (imperatives), as you've always done with computers. For example, instead of 'you are an expert in Lisp', say 'function as an expert in Lisp.'
Are there use cases where that isn't applicable.
'Display the cause of the <this prior output>'.
> needs a certain level of mind gynmastics that is not worth it. I'd rather curse at it.
I guess I knew an LLM's natural language interface made it easier to use for non-technical users. But wow, it's been normalized so quickly. Now the universal old way, needed for every line of code and command line and more, is "mind gynmastics"?
Inputting curses seems just odd to me, beyond the initial novelty. It's a distraction, completely unproductive, and sending emotion into a void.
Anthropomorphisizing it seems dangerous personally and society-wide.
> like the pop up every time I start my car that reminds me I should not play with the screen while I’m driving.
If something like that is the worst result, there is little downside.
The correct answer would sound just like a human unless you either make it do shallow annoying stuff like add redundant ”as an LLM I can’t think or recommend but the answer with the highest probability is …”
We all know the "voice" of log output of normal, non-LLM computer programs. Usually, the statements are in passive voice and tersely describe what the program is doing or print new kind of data available. An LLM with that style would already sound much more like a computer program than a person.
E.g. an answer to your example prompt could be something like:
* Locating relevant code for "genserver" and "sync" in the codebase...
* Reading files...
* Data collection completed. Analysis results are as follows:
* Factors that suggest a bottleneck are:
- ...
* Factors that speak against a bottleneck are:
- ...
* Overall assessment:
- ...
* Request complete.
It is a matter of definition, but a start would be eliminating the social and conversational aspects and attempts at emotional connection.
And we do this with lots of things that are not human for children (e.g. Bluey and Peppa Pig). Do we need a "this is not a human" warning for them, too?
If so, then uhh yeah we should definitely regulate that shit
I'm not completely clear on what we're afraid of here, though. We routinely project human-like characteristics onto non-human things for our children. We don't think this is harmful. Why are we worried about children projecting human characteristics onto an LLM?
We routinely give our children ibuprofen or acetaminophen, this does not imply that some vicodin or oxycontin would be fine.
I think it's a reasonable assumption that a fundamental skill of being a good social creature (which we know to be absolutely critical to good human health) is to be able to distinguish between human and non-human. Or more generally conscious and non-conscious.
You are basing your opinion off of e.g. anthropomorphizing cars or dolls which 1) are obviously not human, and 2) rely on the fairly intense imagination of the anthropomorphizer to "work." Once the imagination stops, the anthropomorphization stops.
In contrast, LLMs successfully delude even intelligent adults into anthropomorphizing them. This is especially problematic for a generation of humans that grow up where most of their human-to-human communication happens intermediated by technology, i.e. LLM-originated interaction looks more human every day, but also human-originated interaction looks more LLM- (or technology-)originated every day too.
We've been living with this pathology for a while now in the form of people treating those humans on the other side of a chatbox vastly worse than they would ever treat a human face to face. Now this is chewing away at the distinction from the other end too.
We are also talking about kids, who will grow up with this technology around them and adapt to it better than we do as adults. We see it as a threat and a change to the natural order of things, because we grew up without it. Kids growing up with it will see it as part of the natural order of things and will learn how to incorporate it into their lives. That will take some adaptation, sure, but that's the same with every new technology. The answer is not to shield them from it, because we just put off the day that they get exposed to it with no training. We must coach and teach them how to deal with it healthily. Of course, that means that we ourselves as adults need to work out how to deal with it healthily first, which isn't always obvious ;)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addiction_disorder
So yes, kids growing up in areas where Oxycontin abuse is prevalent will be much, much, more aware of what that technology does (both the good and the bad) than an adult who is encountering it for the first time. The adult will be way more easily lead into using it by the adverts and advise of the people selling it, the kid will not believe any of that.
All technologies are both harmful and beneficial. We have a Fire Department for a reason, but that doesn't mean we'd go back to eating our food raw.
Uhhh... this is so obviously untrue it's pretty surprising you hit "Submit" after writing it.
By this logic, deep West Virginia where Oxycontin first took hold should chock full of teetotalers "because they know how bad it is" a generation later. This, of course, is not reality. Bad things can and often do actually persist for generations and kill or maim vast numbers of people throughout.
That's because your fundamental thesis of some innate, guaranteed "immune response" to bad things just literally doesn't exist. Sometimes groups of people react and successfully overcome maladaptive exogenous shocks, but sometimes they just get hurt really badly for huge stretches of time. Sometimes entire groups of people are permanently eradicated by bad things.
And no, raising a counterexample is not a bad faith argument.