[ashdksnndck]

Do you say similar stuff when someone talks about the motivations of a character in fiction? Do we have to precede every comment with “I’m anthropomorphizing the LLM as a convenient shorthand when describing the behavior it is modeling”? That’s going to get old.

[eschaton]

If it helps you avoid the errors inherent in anthropomorphizing an LLM, then yes, you should be saying it. Right now, way too many people are extremely sloppy in not just their language but in their thinking around LLMs, both what they are and what they’re capable of.

The difference between that and discussing character motivations in fiction is that in fact a good author writing good characters will actually attribute motivations, struggles, background, and an inner life to their characters in order for their behavior in a story to make sense. That’s why bad writing is described as “lazy” and “formulaic,” characters are doing things because the author wants them to, not because the author has modeled them as independent actors with motivation.

[ashdksnndck]

There is already research in the literature showing that LLMs have neurons that model the gender [1], personality [2], ideology [3], and historic era [4] of the author. There’s also evidence that they model the distinction between the beliefs of the author and other characters, which has been summarized as “theory of mind” [5]. And we have only scratched the surface, with most research using small open-weight models that lag behind frontier model capabilities.

[1] Z. Yu & S. Ananiadou, “Understanding and Mitigating Gender Bias in LLMs via Interpretable Neuron Editing,” arXiv:2501.14457 (2025).

[2] J. Deng et al., “Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction in Large Language Models,” arXiv:2410.12327 (2024).

[3] J. Kim, J. Evans & A. Schein, “Linear Representations of Political Perspective Emerge in Large Language Models,” arXiv:2503.02080 (2025).

[4] W. Gurnee & M. Tegmark, “Language Models Represent Space and Time,” arXiv:2310.02207 (2023).

[5] C. Hardy, “A Sparse ToM Circuit in Gemma-2-2B,” https://xtian.ai/pages/document.pdf

[wonnage]

I don't get it, how is analysis of fictional characters relevant? Nobody is committing a logical error, fictional humans can have fictional motivations and we can talk about them. I think it's still very clear that AI "motivations" and "reasoning" are not real in any human-centric definition of the terms (see recent Apple paper), hence anthropomorphizing is an error

[Terr_]

> Do you say similar stuff when someone talks about the motivations of a character in fiction?

Depends, are we faced with the same problem where a disturbingly-large portion of people don't know the character is fictional, and/or make decisions as if it were real?

If that's still happening, then yes, keeping our unconscious assumptions in check is important.

[kelseyfrog]

I'm coining "fauxthropomorphize" as a neologism to prefix every statement about LLMs and to get the "But you're anthropomorphizing LLMs"-crowd off our collective backs. One can then just start statements like such "Fauxthropomorphizing: <the statement>".

Fauxthropomorphism

/ˈfoʊ-θrə-pə-ˌmɔːr-fɪz-əm/ (noun)

Definition:

The deliberate use of anthropomorphic language to describe non-sentient systems (such as AI models), while explicitly disclaiming belief in their consciousness, agency, or subjective experience. A stylistic or rhetorical shortcut, not an ontological claim.

Etymology:

Blend of faux (French for "false") + anthropomorphism (from Greek anthropos, "human" + morphē, "form").

Lit. “False-human-form-ism.”

[antithesizer]

Your phrasing betrays your anthropomorphization of the insufferable pedant.