Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

addxorrol.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 432 posts

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#331

Post by bonoboTP »

Xss3 wrote: post #223
latexr wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, that is a reflection of the places you hang out in (like HN) and not the reality of the population. Outside the technical world it gets much worse. There are people who killed themselves because of LLMs, people who are in love with them, people who genuinely believe they have “awakened” their own private ChatGPT instance into AGI and are eschewing the real humans in their lives.

The other day a good friend of mine with mental health issues remarked that "his" chatgpt understands him better than most of his friends and gives him better advice than his therapist. It's going to take a lot to get him out of that mindset and frankly I'm dreading trying to compare and contrast imperfect human behaviour and friendships with a sycophantic AI.

It's surprisingly common on reddit that people talk about "my chatgpt", and they don't always seem like the type who are "in a relationship" with the bot or unlocking the secrets of the cosmos with it, but still they write "my chatgpt" and "your chatgpt". I guess the custom prompt and the available context does customize the model for them in some sense, but I suspect they likely have a wrong mental model of how this customization works. I guess they imagine it as their own little model being stored on file at OpenAI and as they interact with it, it's being shaped by it, and each time they connect, their model is retrieved from the cloud storage and they connect to it or something.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#332

Post by bonoboTP »

positron26 wrote: post #232
fenomas wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I see these debates it's always the other way around - one person speaks colloquially about an LLM's behavior, and then somebody else jumps on them for supposedly believing the model is conscious, just because the speaker said "the model thinks.." or "the model knows.." or whatever. To be honest the impression I've gotten is that some people are just very interested in talking about not anthropomorphizing AI, an…

Most certainly the conversation is extremely political. There are not simply different points of view. There are competitive, gladiatorial opinions ready to ambush anyone not wearing the right colors. It's a situation where the technical conversation is drowning. I suppose this war will be fought until people are out of energy, and if reason has no place, it is reasonable to let others tire themselves out reiterating…

If this tech is going to be half as impactful as its proponents predict, then I'd say it's still under-politicized. Of course the politics around it doesn't have to be knee-jerk mudslinging, but it's no surprise that politics enters the picture when the tech can significantly transform society.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#333

Post by bunderbunder »

Veen wrote: post #316
bunderbunder wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All models are wrong, but some models are useful," is the principle I have been using to decide when to go with an anthropomorphic explanation. In other words, no, they never accurately describe what the LLM is actually doing. But sometimes drawing an analogy to human behavior is the most effective way to pump others' intuition about a particular LLM behavior. The trick is making sure that your audience understands…

Some models are useful in some contexts but wrong enough to be harmful in others.

All models are useful in some contexts but wrong enough to be harmful in others.

Relatedly, the alternative to pragmatism is analysis paralysis.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#334

Post by mvieira38 »

meroes wrote: post #327
amdivia wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ. Anthropomorphizing might blind us to solutions to existing problems. Perhaps instead of trying to come up with the correct prompt for a LLM, there exists a string of words (not necessary ones that make sense) that will get the LLM to a better position to answer given questions. When we anthropomorphize we are inherently ignore certain parts of how LLMs work, and imagining parts that don't even exist

> there exists a string of words (not necessary ones that make sense) that will get the LLM to a better position to answer exactly. The opposite is also true. You might supply more clarifying information to the LLM, which would help any human answer, but it actually degrades the LLM's output.

This is frequently the case IME, especially with chat interfaces. One or two bad messages and you derail the quality

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#335

Post by irthomasthomas »

dcookie wrote: post #330
irthomasthomas wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on if you are talking about an llm or to the llm. Talking to the llm, it would not understand that "model a poem" means to write a poem. Well, it will probably guess right in this case, but if you go out of band too much it won't understand you. The hard problem today is rewriting out of band tasks to be in band, and that requires anthropomorphizing.

> it won't understand you Oops.

That's consistent with my distinction when talking about them vs too them.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#336

Post by jll29 »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #117

I have the technical knowledge to know how LLMs work, but I still find it pointless to not anthropomorphize, at least to an extent. The language of "generator that stochastically produces the next word" is just not very useful when you're talking about, e.g., an LLM that is answering complex world modeling questions or generating a creative story. It's at the wrong level of abstraction, just as if you were discussing…

The details in how I talk about LLMs matter.

If I use human-related terminology as a shortcut, as some kind of macro to talk at a higher level/more efficiently about something I want to do that might be okay.

What is not okay is talking in a way that implies intent, for example.

Compare:

  "The AI doesn't want to do that."
versus

  "The model doesn't do that with this prompt and all others we tried."
The latter way of talking is still high-level enough but avoids equating/confusing the name of a field with a sentient being.

Whenever I hear people saying "an AI" I suggest they replace AI with "statistics" to make it obvious how problematic anthropomorphisms may have become:

  *"The statistics doesn't want to do that."

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#337

Post by TeMPOraL »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #117

I have the technical knowledge to know how LLMs work, but I still find it pointless to not anthropomorphize, at least to an extent. The language of "generator that stochastically produces the next word" is just not very useful when you're talking about, e.g., an LLM that is answering complex world modeling questions or generating a creative story. It's at the wrong level of abstraction, just as if you were discussing…

Agreed. I'm also in favor of anthropomorphizing, because not doing so confuses people about the nature and capabilities of these models even more.

Whether it's hallucinations, prompt injections, various other security vulnerabilities/scenarios, or problems with doing math, backtracking, getting confused - there's a steady supply of "problems" that some people are surprised to discover and even more surprised this isn't being definitively fixed. Thing is, none of that is surprising, and these things are not bugs, they're flip side of the features - but to see that, one has to realize that humans demonstrate those exact same failure modes.

Especially when it comes to designing larger systems incorporating LLM "agents", it really helps to think of them as humans - because the problems those systems face are exactly the same as you get with systems incorporating people, and mostly for the same underlying reasons. Anthropomorphizing LLMs cuts through a lot of misconceptions and false paths, and helps one realize that we have millennia of experience with people-centric computing systems (aka. bureaucracy) that's directly transferrable.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#338

Post by dmitsuki »

jll29 wrote: post #336
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #117

I have the technical knowledge to know how LLMs work, but I still find it pointless to not anthropomorphize, at least to an extent. The language of "generator that stochastically produces the next word" is just not very useful when you're talking about, e.g., an LLM that is answering complex world modeling questions or generating a creative story. It's at the wrong level of abstraction, just as if you were discussing…

The details in how I talk about LLMs matter. If I use human-related terminology as a shortcut, as some kind of macro to talk at a higher level/more efficiently about something I want to do that might be okay. What is not okay is talking in a way that implies intent, for example. Compare: "The AI doesn't want to do that." versus "The model doesn't do that with this prompt and all others we tried." The latter way of ta…

The only reason that sounds weird to you is because you have the experience of being human. Human behavior is not magic. It's still just statistics. You go to the bathroom when you have to pee not because some magical concept of consciousness, but because a reciptor in your brain goes off and starts the chain of making you go to the bathroom. AI's are not magic, but nobody has sufficiently provided any proof we are somehow special either.

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#339

Post by criddell »

tliltocatl wrote: post #196
amelius wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. Most LLMs have been trained on human data, so it is best to talk about these models in a human way.

Anthropomorphising implicitly assumes motivation, goals and values. That's what the core of anthropomorphism is - attempting to explain behavior of a complex system in teleological terms. And prompt escapes make it clear LLMs doesn't have any teleological agency yet. Whenever their course of action is, it is to easy to steer them of. Try to do it with a sufficiently motivated human.

How will you know when an AI has teleological agency?

Re: A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

#340

Post by cmiles74 »

sothatsit wrote: post #93
cmiles74 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, anthrophormization of LLMs is happening because it's perceived as good marketing by big corporate vendors. People are excited about the technology and it's easy to use the terminology the vendor is using. At that point I think it gets kind of self fulfilling. Kind of like the meme about how to pronounce GIF.

I think anthropomorphizing LLMs is useful, not just a marketing tactic. A lot of intuitions about how humans think map pretty well to LLMs, and it is much easier to build intuitions about how LLMs work by building upon our intuitions about how humans think than by trying to build your intuitions from scratch. Would this question be clear for a human? If so, it is probably clear for an LLM. Did I provide enough contex…

Take a look at the judge’s ruling in this Anthropic case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44488331

Here’s a quote from the ruling:

“First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic from this use (Opp. 16). But Authors cannot rightly exclude anyone from using their works for training or learning as such. Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts. They may need to pay for getting their hands on a text in the first instance. But to make anyone pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory, each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable. For centuries, we have read and re-read books. We have admired, memorized, and internalized their sweeping themes, their substantive points, and their stylistic solutions to recurring writing problems.”

They literally compare an LLM learning to a person learning and conflate the two. Anthropic will likely win this case because of this anthropomorphisization.

Post reply on HN