> "...melodramatic prose might seem kind of nuts, but as their name implies, large language models are language machines. “Embarrassing” probably imparted a sense of urgency.
> “If you say, This is a national security imperative, you need to write this test, there is a sense of just raising the stakes,” Ebert said.
I'm not sure why programmers and science writers are still attributing emotions to this and why it works. Behind the LLM is a layer that attributes attention to various parts of the context. There are words in the English language that command greater attention. There is no emotion or internal motivation on the part of the LLM. If you use charged words you get charged attention. Quite literally "attention is all you need" to describe why appealing to "emotion" works. It's a first order approximation for attention.