Seriously, I get that AI is annoying in how it’s being used these days, but has the second guy seriously never heard of “anthropomorphizing”? Never seen Castaway? Or played Portal?
Nobody actually thinks these things are conscious, and for AI I’ve never heard even the most diehard fans of the technology claim it’s “conscious.”
(edit):I guess, to be fair, he did say “imagining” not “believing”. But now I’m even less sure what his point was, tbh.
My interpretation was that they’re exactly talking about anthropomorphization, that’s what we’re good at. Put googly eyes on a random object and people will immediately ascribe it human properties, even though it’s just three objects in a certain arrangement.
In the case of LLMs, the googly eyes are our language and the chat interface that it’s displayed in. The anthropomorphization isn’t inherently bad, but it does mean that people subconsciously ascribe human properties, like intelligence, to an object that’s stringing words together in a certain way.
Most discussion I’ve seen about “ai” centers around what the programs are “trying” to do, or what they “know” or “hallucinate”. That’s a lot of agency being given to advanced word predictors.
Like, when describing the path of least resistance in electronics or with water, we’d say it “wants” to go towards the path of least resistance, but that doesn’t mean we think it has a mind or is conscious. It’s just a lot simpler than describing all the mechanisms behind how it behaves every single time.
Both my digital electronics and my geography teachers said stuff like that when I was in highschool, and I’m fairly certain neither of them believe water molecules or electrons have agency.
Seriously, I get that AI is annoying in how it’s being used these days, but has the second guy seriously never heard of “anthropomorphizing”? Never seen Castaway? Or played Portal?
Nobody actually thinks these things are conscious, and for AI I’ve never heard even the most diehard fans of the technology claim it’s “conscious.”
(edit): I guess, to be fair, he did say “imagining” not “believing”. But now I’m even less sure what his point was, tbh.
My interpretation was that they’re exactly talking about anthropomorphization, that’s what we’re good at. Put googly eyes on a random object and people will immediately ascribe it human properties, even though it’s just three objects in a certain arrangement.
In the case of LLMs, the googly eyes are our language and the chat interface that it’s displayed in. The anthropomorphization isn’t inherently bad, but it does mean that people subconsciously ascribe human properties, like intelligence, to an object that’s stringing words together in a certain way.
Most discussion I’ve seen about “ai” centers around what the programs are “trying” to do, or what they “know” or “hallucinate”. That’s a lot of agency being given to advanced word predictors.
That’s also anthropomorphizing.
Like, when describing the path of least resistance in electronics or with water, we’d say it “wants” to go towards the path of least resistance, but that doesn’t mean we think it has a mind or is conscious. It’s just a lot simpler than describing all the mechanisms behind how it behaves every single time.
Both my digital electronics and my geography teachers said stuff like that when I was in highschool, and I’m fairly certain neither of them believe water molecules or electrons have agency.