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by dirkc 33 days ago
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?

1 comments

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.

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