[emp17344]

The solution is to stop treating AI as superhuman semi-living entities, as many boosters are apt to do. We can acknowledge it as a useful tool while understanding it has limits and is not “alive” or “thinking” in the same way a human is.

[lll-o-lll]

That’s not a solution. Humans are wired to anthropomorphise; we do it with sticks and rocks. How much more so with LLMs.

We’ve invented a technology that hijacks that part of humanity more effectively than anything ever. Asking people to “not be so stupid” is not going to help.

[emp17344]

The marketing and ecosystem surrounding these tools feeds into the anthropomorphization to a huge extent, though. You’re doing the opposite - throwing up your hands and going “it’s our evolutionary instinct, what can you do” while willfully ignoring how manipulated this space is. OpenAI alone has a higher advertising budget than Coca-Cola.

[mmooss]

> The marketing and ecosystem surrounding these tools feeds into the anthropomorphization to a huge extent

And especially their design. The con artist politeness and confidence is not an accident of output, but a design choice by the developers.

I tell non-technical people: It's a software program; there is always a person behind it, and they have consciously chosen this output, to serve their own interests.

[mohamedkoubaa]

People who should know better do it too

[mmooss]

Both claims seem to obviously contradict reality, imho:

> Humans are wired to anthropomorphise; we do it with sticks and rocks.

I do not see people anthropomorphize their TVs, books, paintings, cars, houses, rocks, sticks, ... I'm not sure what you're talking about here. I haven't seen someone call a rock or stick by a pronoun, for example.

I've seen people fancifully do it, but it's exaggeration for a cute effect, and works because everyone knows they're exaggerating.

> We’ve invented a technology that hijacks that part of humanity more effectively than anything ever. Asking people to “not be so stupid” is not going to help.

People learn to look at things in different ways. Humans learn, society changes. It's changed quite a bit in recent years; it's much different than a century ago, a century before that, etc.

In a way, it's more worship of technology to say humans are hopelessly, powerlessly dumb, and technology inevitably rules them. The inevitability of technology is of course a self-serving trope of the industry: you are powerless, we are inevitable. How convenient, and short-sighted.

[lll-o-lll]

I did not say that humans anthropomorphise every rock or stick. The point is that we are hard-wired for this possibility. Perhaps something more relatable? A cat? We ascribe all sorts of emotions to instinctive feline behaviours. It doesn’t matter with cats.

> In a way, it's more worship of technology to say humans are hopelessly, powerlessly dumb, and technology inevitably rules them.

You as an individual have some autonomy against the machines. Some. (Scroll facebook an hour a day and show me your resilience to engagement engineering). But the point of this is what happens at population scale.

To ignore our biology is as stupid as suggesting we must be ruled by it.

[crooked-v]

What I'd like is the TNG ship computer: an extremely smart system that nonetheless limits its "creativity" to the clearly marked holodeck, where simple prompting is treated like the casual throwaway diversion it is, and actual authors are still putting in substantial effort and personal preferences and viewpoints into their work.

[palmotea]

> The solution is to stop treating AI as superhuman semi-living entities, as many boosters are apt to do.

It's not just fanboys doing that, but "official" educational channels. Both an internal training (more like an all-hands knowledge share) and some dumb training session by a guy from Anthropic explicitly, repeatedly recommended users anthropomorphize their chatbots on no uncertain terms. "Treat it as your super-smart coworkers", "I named mine Becky and I go to her with all my work challenges", etc.

[customguy]

ChatGPT just hit me with "I smiled at this:" ...