[scotty79]

That's the issue. You frame your relationships with people using words like "grace" and "patience".

If you were "good natured", "kind hearted", "understanding" and "nurturing" instead you wouldn't have to "extend" it to "machines" because those are not limited resources you can run out of. Politeness towards AI would come naturally because of who you are. The only thing you could run out of is energy and that's easy to replenish with a bit of sleep and a meal.

And it would lead to better results. Not because there'd be some genuine psychological interaction between you and LLM. LLMs are not machines. They are just a finetuned math equation that tends to give better results when people act nice.

Also it would be better for your own well being because it would reduce your frustration. Both with LLMs and people.

[recursive]

You're making a lot of assertions about the nature of relationships and the definition of machines. I'll assume this is based on a philosophy that works for you. But now you have set up a system of definitions where, for example, a good natured person, by definition, cannot be frustrated. It kind of sounds like sophistry to me.

I genuinely don't understand your argument about machines. It's not a machine it's just a system of levers and pulleys.

I have developed some of my own systems for minimizing frustration, and they generally work reasonably well, despite being different from yours.

[scotty79]

> You're making a lot of assertions about the nature of relationships and the definition of machines. I'll assume this is based on a philosophy that works for you

Always.

> But now you have set up a system of definitions where, for example, a good natured person, by definition, cannot be frustrated.

> It kind of sounds like sophistry to me.

It's just my lived experience. When I get frustrated I don't look for guilty and their flaws or seek retribution. I'm feeling something more along the lines "I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed." and tired that the world is not in the state I would like it to be.

Do you think Mr. Rogers would verbally abuse AI if it wasn't giving him answers he expected because he ran out of "patience" or "grace"?

> I genuinely don't understand your argument about machines. It's not a machine it's just a system of levers and pulleys.

Think for a moment about a "machine". List all the things that you expect of machines, that you think they ought to be, that you know they sometimes are. Think about their behaviors both intended and unintended. Think about would you evaluate what is a good and a bad machine. Now you have a rough picture of what a machine is for you.

Now try to imagine something else like a fast food worker, or a cat or a dining experience. Try to imagine that whatever you came up with is a machine. You expect them to have machine qualities, machine flaws and you expect of them what you would expect of a machine. Inspect how many mistakes would you make if you navigated the world with assumption that they belong to a "machine" class. How many frustrations and of what kinds would that bring.

Regardless of LLMs implementation details, based only on the results and frustrations, yours and reported by other people, can you recognize that thinking about them as of "machines" is a misclassification error?

Something like a ChatGPT app is more of a machine, but nearly its entire value comes from the main component that has almost nothing to do with the concept of a machine.

[recursive]

There is overlap in the things that humans and machines can do. But to me, humans enjoy a special position regardless of what they can do or are doing.

If I'm using a ball-point pen (a machine) that's leaking ink, I'm just going to throw it in the trash.

If I'm using a hand-made slingshot made as a gift, and one of the straps breaks, I will endeavor to fix it.

To me, the chief difference between a fast food worker and a machine is that one is a human. To me, humans deserve more respect than machines simply because they are humans. If a human successfully tricks me into thinking they are not a human, then I will also erroneously afford them less respect than I intended to.

What you call the biggest value of ChatGPT is what I'd call its biggest threat.

[scotty79]

Special pleading is rarely a good strategy.

I value people for being people but it's completely orthogonal with anything else. I might at the same time value fast-food worker for being human with full kindheartedness I have for any stranger and find them completely useless for taking my order in comparison to the self-checkout kiosk. One doesn't influence the other and the other way around. I won't think worse of them as humans, because they don't fit my needs when it comes to taking order. And I won't think they are better at taking my order just because they are human.

> What you call the biggest value of ChatGPT is what I'd call its biggest threat.

I didn't mean LLM is a biggest value of ChatGPT system in terms of appreciation. I was just stating a fact that without LLM ChatGPT is just a lame chat app with some text filters that we pretty much had for the last 3 decades, so not very valuable. And that part of little value is the machine part of ChatGPT system. LLM itself is not a machine. It doesn't have machine flaws any more than a fast-food worker, or a dining experience or literal walk in a park could have machine flaws. LLMs are math. If you want to look for their flaws, you need to look for math flaws. You can be angry at them not in a way you are angry at machines (or people, or park walks, or dining experiences), only in a way you could be angry at math.

I can't really remember if I was ever angry at math.