[dirkc]

> So with my friend Claude I set about building

After this line all the references becomes *we*. I can't help but be a little disturbed by that

> To begin with we downloaded ... For instance we excluded ... We also selected ... We used this as a notoriety ... <and many more>

I am increasingly concerned about how LLMs are anthropomorphizing and how that affects our judgement?

[kalli]

This was a conscious choice, addressed in a footnote in the blog post:

> This is my first time writing up a project that I worked on using an AI agent. I kept writing “we” because the project felt like a collaboration.[...] On reading it back, saying we feels like an accountability dodge, because of course I’m fully and solely responsible for any errors in this write-up or code. But just using I/me also feels dishonest, because so much of the implementation here isn’t fully mine so I feel like I’m taking too much credit for my collaboration with the machines. I figure this is a new kind of pronouns debate we’ll be having for the foreseeable future.

I think it is an interesting topic.

[dirkc]

Thanks for pointing out the footnote, I did not get that far. And like you say, I agree it's interesting.

The footnote however does re-enforce my concern - in what other ways do we alter our behavior when it feels like we're interacting with another human?

[kalli]

That's fair, we can disagree. I don't think I'm personally anthropomorphising llms (I think my mental model of how they work is rough but fairly accurate), but at a population level it might be something to be concerned about (see all the ai-psychosis talk)

What I was getting at with the "we" in the post is more how we talk and think about work like this. I think it is different in kind to previous projects I've done where a relied on google, stack overflow and elbow grease. Programming has always been "standing on the shoulders of giants" kind of work, but doing it with agents feels different from that. Maybe it was a poor stylistic choice, but I think we need a way to talk about it in an honest way.

[AnthonBerg]

There's the very nice precedent of using "we" in academic literature. You wrote that piece well. (You singular wrote we plural?, haha)