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by beowulfey 128 days ago
LLMs talk like people; there is nothing wrong with this. It's perfectly fine to be nice to something even if it isn't human. It's why we don't go around kicking dogs for fun.

I understand why people don't act polite to LLMs, but honestly I think not thanking them will make people act more dickish to other humans.

1 comments

I like to think we can perceive a difference between a machine and a living being. I don't thank my bicycle for transporting me or thank my spell-checker for finding typos. I get that we are prone to anthropomorphize but was just something I found a bit surprising.
>I don't thank my bicycle for transporting me or thank my spell-checker for finding typos.

Neither your bicycle nor your spell-checker hold conversations and answer questions, neither of them is being used as therapist or virtual girl/boy friend, and neither's whole shtick is being trained on a ginormous human corpus to convincingly respond like a person.

I like to think we can perceive a difference between a bicycle and an something specifically developed and trained to pass for intelligence...

See, i have absolutely thanked my car. When i was broke driving a beater and it was below zero outside, practically every time it chose to start lol

I don't think it's that weird