I know people who are like that too.
I'm not sure anthropomorphizing is a problem. Seeing analogies everywhere is an innate human trait, sometimes it can be harmful but more often it's useful.
Stop posting these things. Stop thinking these things.
Online comment sections are not the correct place to unpack any of this.
Which is indeed terminating this comment chain, but for good (and benevolent) reason. Doing anything else other than referring to a trained professional in a controlled context would potentially just feed delusions, which is highly unethical.
Might not even be yours but those of another reader.
In the right space with real people, worthy of a debate. On HN? No. Not like this. Not here. Not without filtering the participants for real human beings.
But regardless, you're using this as an insult. I did not.
There is no debate to be had here. Just a bad faith shouting match
I mean, that is the entire definition of the word. And you also anthropomorphize living beings like many people genuinely attach human qualities to their pets etc. Yes, the risks are very high when it comes to chatbots in particular, especially to people who are not technically inclined. But you'll be surprised at how crucial the ability of anthropomorphizing is. This is a very good paper that summarizes it and is definitely worth reading if you're interested in these things: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5936908_On_Seeing_H...
Not quite - my wording there was very deliberate. By saying that it's a problem when you're treating something that's not living (not non-human!) as if it were, that excludes pets and all animals from the equation. I understand how common it is for humans to assign human qualities to other things and beings, but there is also an unspoken variable of intensity. Representing abstract concepts as humans, interpreting living things in a human-like way or traditionally referring to ships as living beings has a different degree of belief and intensity compared to implying a genuine belief that algorithms are beings that can be enslaved, like what the sibling comment to this one does.
And you are wrong in your defintion of the world. Attaching human qualities to any non human entity (living or otherwise) is the accepted defintion of what anthropomorphizing is. It does not only apply to non-living entities.
This is part of the problem being described. You are part of the problem.
"Some people are bad at X" is not comparable—is not even in the same category—as "LLMs are fundamentally incapable of X".
Every human (at least to a first approximation) is capable of understanding, of learning, of remembering things, of doing math, of counting the number of "r"s in "strawberry".
What you are observing is that some humans are careless, do not take the time and effort to understand, or have internalized the idea that they're "not smart enough" or "not the type of person" who understands things like <whatever>.
That has nothing remotely to do with the fact that LLMs have no consciousness, no self-awareness, no cognition, no understanding. At a fundamental level.
This is deeply untrue, and is highly likely to lead them to bad conclusions about what we can and should do with LLMs.
Claiming that LLMs are conscious or human-like because humans can't do X seems a very strange way to argue for LLM intelligence.
Usually, it goes the other way around: an LLM sceptic says "LLMs are dumb because they can't do X" and soon someone has to remind them that also most of the population can't, in fact, do X.
And it should not go this way, is the OPs point.
For an analogy, imagine someone looked at a bunch of lightbulbs and expresses dissatisfaction that they aren’t really stars. If someone replies by saying “not all stars are equally bright”, do you think that fact should carry any weight in the argument?
Well, he's wrong. If you argue that LLMs and humans are fundamentally different because all LLMs do X and no human does it, then showing you that it's not true demolishes your argument. Doesn't prove anything positive, but it certainly proves that your argument is invalid.
If I call a lightbulb an artificial star, the onus is on me to show the behavior under the hood is star like, not just to point at the light and say “you must see it’s a a star since it’s emitting light!”.
Sorry, no. The only thing it requires you to buy is basic logic. If you argue that B is true because of A, the fact that A is false invalidates your argument (I repeat: not B but your argument). There is no question about it.
To say the same process is occurring with all this different is bizarre, and that is why the OP is right about which direction the argument of similarity has meaning.
You don’t disagree that our only pre-LLM exemplars of conscious thinking systems is from biology right?
If you’re introducing a new member, you have to compare it across all levels before making a similarity claim. It’s the height of ridiculousness to think otherwise.
Cool.
Question: Why _on earth_ would we make more of them?
It is a problem because it does not really understand stuff. For example, if you ask a human "Do you understand that doing X will kill you 100%?". If the human answers "Yes", then you can expect the human to act according to that understanding. That they will not do X
But an LLM will happily acknowledges the consequences of doing X, but will still proceed to do X. So replace the human in the above example with a robot controlled by an LLM. There is no guarantee that it will not do X.
It's easy to say that people have other motivations, but doesn't the AI, too?
You tell it not to do X, but you've also told it to do something that would benefit from X. It's going to "want" to still do X, to support that other thing.
It's also got all the "knowledge" that enables it to do the work in the first place, and all of the tendencies of the people who do that work, because that's what it's trained on.
It's really easy to anthropomorphize AI because it was literally modeled after people.
And for the record, as lead developer, I've had actual humans that reported me to go ahead and do things I specifically told them not to.
Which part of "X will kill you 100%" did you not get?