Similar issues arose with automated learning companions for XR. Mismatches between a learner's mental model of the companion, and its actual capabilities and limitations, can cause so many problematic misunderstandings. So one idea, is to emphasize non-human non-social sources of behavior - to set up alternative narratives for "why did it do that?". The companion might be "Sparky, the glitching robot dog". So forgetting things, getting them wrong, spacing out, being unhelpful, confused, distracted, missing social cues, giving poor cues, etc... that's just glitchy robot dog glitching, not social signal. Maybe - speculative.
When my niece was very young, I showed her my Polaris pool cleaner. It’s a simple contraption. Just some hoses attached to a small box with a few wheels. It rolls around the pool, sucking up leaves on the bottom.
She took it all in, and then turned to me and asked: “Is that robot’s family living in the ocean?”
Why allow anthropomorphism in LLM or any computer output, for any age group?
A simple regulation would be that all LLM output must:
* Explicitly identify itself as a computer
* Identify the human or human org controlling it
(e.g., 'This is Claude v8.90 software made by Anthropic.')
* Not attempt to mimic humans except for entertainment
purposes, and then clearly labeled (e.g., 'This is not
a human. It is a computer pretending to be human for
entertainment purposes.').
What violation of those regulations would be for other than defrauding and/or manipulationg people? They are easily complied with and I don't see those regulations impacting the economic productivity gains projected for LLM use.
This sounds like the kind of well-intentioned thinking that results in products that are no safer practically but are far more unpleasant to interact with. This is like the pop up every time I start my car that reminds me I should not play with the screen while I’m driving.
The annoyance of every AI announcing is a machine every time it’s invoked is obvious. I don’t see any basis offered for this actually doing anything beneficial.
What does it even mean ”do not mimick humans”? How are the AI supposed to reply if I ask ”do you think this genserver will be a bottleneck in the sync process and how can we fix it?”
The correct answer would sound just like a human unless you either make it do shallow annoying stuff like add redundant ”as an LLM I can’t think or recommend but the answer with the highest probability is …”
More "Star Trek computer" and less C3PO would be a start.
We all know the "voice" of log output of normal, non-LLM computer programs. Usually, the statements are in passive voice and tersely describe what the program is doing or print new kind of data available. An LLM with that style would already sound much more like a computer program than a person.
E.g. an answer to your example prompt could be something like:
* Locating relevant code for "genserver" and "sync" in the codebase...
* Reading files...
* Data collection completed. Analysis results are as follows:
* Factors that suggest a bottleneck are:
- ...
* Factors that speak against a bottleneck are:
- ...
* Overall assessment:
- ...
* Request complete.
Computers long have always, before LLMs, and most still do do output responses that don't sound like humans. It's hard to understand why you think that's hard.
It is a matter of definition, but a start would be eliminating the social and conversational aspects and attempts at emotional connection.
Isn't this about children attributing human characteristics onto the LLM, rather than the LLM itself pretending to be human?
And we do this with lots of things that are not human for children (e.g. Bluey and Peppa Pig). Do we need a "this is not a human" warning for them, too?
If not now, then soon, yes. I'll bet money there's a toy manufacturer somewhere working out how to hook a Bluey doll up to an LLM to make it responsive.
I'm not completely clear on what we're afraid of here, though. We routinely project human-like characteristics onto non-human things for our children. We don't think this is harmful. Why are we worried about children projecting human characteristics onto an LLM?
Obviously the people who think LLMs should be forbidden from this use-case would think it should be forbidden from put-it-in-a-doll use-case.
We routinely give our children ibuprofen or acetaminophen, this does not imply that some vicodin or oxycontin would be fine.
I think it's a reasonable assumption that a fundamental skill of being a good social creature (which we know to be absolutely critical to good human health) is to be able to distinguish between human and non-human. Or more generally conscious and non-conscious.
You are basing your opinion off of e.g. anthropomorphizing cars or dolls which 1) are obviously not human, and 2) rely on the fairly intense imagination of the anthropomorphizer to "work." Once the imagination stops, the anthropomorphization stops.
In contrast, LLMs successfully delude even intelligent adults into anthropomorphizing them. This is especially problematic for a generation of humans that grow up where most of their human-to-human communication happens intermediated by technology, i.e. LLM-originated interaction looks more human every day, but also human-originated interaction looks more LLM- (or technology-)originated every day too.
We've been living with this pathology for a while now in the form of people treating those humans on the other side of a chatbox vastly worse than they would ever treat a human face to face. Now this is chewing away at the distinction from the other end too.
I'm always wary of extrapolating from the few individuals who experience that harmful interaction with chatbots to the general population. We have the same thing with every new tech, that some people react badly/too strongly to it and get into a mental health situation [0]. There's nothing unusual about LLM chatbots in this respect. So yes, some people anthropomorphise LLMs too much, but that's not a statement you can make about the general population as "even intelligent adults anthropomorphise LLMs too much".
We are also talking about kids, who will grow up with this technology around them and adapt to it better than we do as adults. We see it as a threat and a change to the natural order of things, because we grew up without it. Kids growing up with it will see it as part of the natural order of things and will learn how to incorporate it into their lives. That will take some adaptation, sure, but that's the same with every new technology. The answer is not to shield them from it, because we just put off the day that they get exposed to it with no training. We must coach and teach them how to deal with it healthily. Of course, that means that we ourselves as adults need to work out how to deal with it healthily first, which isn't always obvious ;)
Yeah that's adults, though. Unless we go down the McDonalds coffee warning path "warning: this LLM is not human and can harm you if you treat it as human"
Role play, which is a huge consumer of tokens. You can glance at openrouter's usage stats and see what apps tokens are going to and what the inference content was classified as. It's quite revealing.
How would that regulation interfere with role play? Role play is 'play'; people know what it is.
It shouldn't interfere with immersion: People suspend disbelief in movie theaters or reading books, despite knowing it's a film or novel. The risk with AI is that people don't understand what an LLM is.
As a matter of fact, for the line of work I do (programming, devops, the works) being conscious about the fact that I am just getting an algorithm outputting text that is probabilistically related to the input I gave it would actually be healthy for me and my mental state.
I HATE having to say "you" when working with an LLM.
One solution is to use commands (imperatives), as you've always done with computers. For example, instead of 'you are an expert in Lisp', say 'function as an expert in Lisp.'
I don't think that works at all times; actually I think it only works when starting a conversation. In the middle, "Why ~did you~ while action as an export in Lisp <this happened>?" needs a certain level of mind gynmastics that is not worth it. I'd rather curse at it.
I do wonder if there are circumstances where it doesn't work. But it's hard to believe I'm addressing basic syntax for computer commands on HN:
'Display the cause of the <this prior output>'.
> needs a certain level of mind gynmastics that is not worth it. I'd rather curse at it.
I guess I knew an LLM's natural language interface made it easier to use for non-technical users. But wow, it's been normalized so quickly. Now the universal old way, needed for every line of code and command line and more, is "mind gynmastics"?
Inputting curses seems just odd to me, beyond the initial novelty. It's a distraction, completely unproductive, and sending emotion into a void.
Anthropomorphisizing it seems dangerous personally and society-wide.
I have the same urge - third-person the LLM is an it, for sure, but I'm not aware of a suitable second-person construction for talking to things. Maybe we need to invent one.
Always loved the tweet: "I don't know what machine they were raging against, but I'm pretty sure it was a printer" [paraphrased]. We could definitely update that.
I'm Australian, so "oi cunt" works about as well as "you" for most things, though I'm not suggesting we adopt that formally.
I'm curious what specific chatbots they used, a companion chatbot is quite different than say chatgpt. And I imagine the former is what children will anthropomorphize, my understand is chatgpt/gemini/the standard is more "do my homework" services. I am curious if the same mechanisms they found with children are the same or at least on the same thread line with the adults who found companions or attachment with certain models (like the gpt 4o saga).
In section 4.2 they have a figure with the models that each of the studies used that they analyzed. Overwhelmingly (28/36) it was a GPT model. Top 4 use cases for the apps were self-directed information seeking, co-authoring stories with AI, teaching science through dialogue, and eliciting children's emotional expression.
When my daughter was 7yo and she talked to chatgpt, she repeatedly asked, what's your name? are you a boy or a girl? eventually she lost interest at the evasiveness of the answers, like she marked it as not fun to interact with, not a real person. It's different now, that she understands it can help with homework :D