Chatting with an agent using language feels like talking to an assistant.
I don’t think my meat brain is able to really differentiate between writing a message to an agent versus writing an agent to a human.
I’ll keep being polite and grateful to agents, so that I maintain those social habits for when I talk to humans.
I do that. But I also act rude and call it names at times. I think that is also what makes us human.
I don’t think LLMs are conscious but I’m still nice to them because it makes me feel bad when I’m rude to them.
My take is that people deserve to be treated with respect because they are people, not because they are smart and/or interesting. I don't treat people differently based on their IQ.
But, as I said, I totally understand your point of view, particularly the idea that people are different from machines and deserve to be treated differently.
An unlikely failure mechanism perhaps but it costs me nothing to avoid it.
An LLM is not a person. Do not humanise it. Do not personalise it. Do not treat it as more than a glorified autocorrect—that’s what it really is.
Humanising LLMs is exactly what these companies want, because then they can really take advantage of the I in AI which is exactly what makes people think these steroidal spellcheckers have any semblance of intelligence, person and personality.
Stop it.
On the other hand, what an LLM is trying to autocomplete is a story of a conversation between its user and a helpful assistant, so maintaining the decorum of office politeness will align more with how it's fine-tuned and produce higher quality output.
Eventually, they’ll try “I’m hurt that you won’t consider my suggestion for <advertised product/political position>.” And people will fall for it.
Being a curmudgeonly asshole is apparently the key to surviving in this brave new world and I’m way ahead of the game!
Taking LLMs for what they are is in no way near to thinking these pieces of software possess personality, intelligence and reasoning capabilities.