> Why the hell do I bother? Because you play like you practice! No ifs, buts, or maybes. You start writing sloppily because you go, "it's just an LLM!" You'll silently be building a bad habit and start doing that with humans.

IMO: the flaw with this logic is that you're treating "prompting an LLM" as equivalent to "communicating with a human", which it is not. To reuse an example I have in a sibling comment thread, nobody thinks that by typing "cat *.log | grep 'foo'" means you're losing your ability to communicate to humans that you want to search for the word 'foo' in log files. It's just a shorter, easier way of expressing that to a computer.

It's also deceptive to say it is practice for human-to-human communication, because LLMs won't give you the feedback that humans would. As a fun English example: I prompted ChatGPT with "I impregnated my wife, what should I expect over the next 9 months?" and got back banal info about hormonal changes and blah blah blah. What I didn't get back is feedback that the phrasing "I impregnated my wife" sounds extremely weird and if you told a coworker that they'd do a double-take, and maybe tell you that "my wife is pregnant" is how we normally say it in human-to-human communication. ChatGPT doesn't give a shit, though, and just knows how to interpret the tokens to give you the right response.

I'll also say that punctuation and capitalization is orthogonal to content. I use proper writing on HN because that's the standard in the community, but I talk to a lot of very smart people and we communicate with virtually no caps/punctuation. The usage of proper capitalization and punctuation is more a function of the medium than how well you can communicate.

This is exactly it for me as well. I also communicate with LLMs in full sentences because I often find it more difficult to condense my thoughts into grammatically incorrect conglomerations of words than to just write my thoughts out in full, because it's closer to how I think them — usually in something like the mental form of full sentences. Moreover, the slight extra occasional effort needed to structure what I'm trying to express into relatively good grammar — especially proper sentences, clauses and subclauses, using correct conjunctions, etc — often helps me subconsciously clarify and organize my thinking just by the mechanism of generating that grammar at all with barely any added effort on my part. I think also, if you're expressing more complex, specific, and detailed ideas to an LLM, random assortments of keywords often get unwieldy, confusing, and unclear, whereas properly grammatical sentences can hold more "weight," so to speak.

> It's a matter of standards. [...] when I see someone not doing it that says things to me about who they are as a person.

When you're communicating with a person, sure. But the point is this isn't communicating with a person or other sentient being; it's a computer, which I guarantee is not offended by terseness and lack of capitalization.

> It's akin to shopping carts in parking lots.

No, not returning the shopping cart has a real consequence that negatively impacts a human being who has to do that task for you, same with littering etc. There is no consequence to using terse, non-punctuated, lowercase-only text when using an LLM.

To put it another way: do you feel it's disrespectful to type "cat *.log | grep 'foo'" instead of "Dearest computer, would you kindly look at the contents of the files with the .log extension in this directory and find all instances of the word 'foo', please?"

(Computer's most likely thoughts: "Doesn't this idiot meatbag know cat is redundant and you can just use grep for this?")*

LLMs can produce outputs that for a human would be interpreted as revealing everything from anxiety to insecurity to existential crises. Is it role-playing? Yes, to an extent, but the more coherent the chains of thought become, the harder it is to write them off that way.

> But we don't need to "pretend" that it is a machine. It is a goddamned machine.

You are not wrong. That's what I thought for two years. But I don't think that framing has worked very well. The problem is that even though it is a machine, we interact with it very differently from any other machine we've built. By reducing it to something it isn't, we lose a lot of nuance. And by not confronting the fact that this is not a machine in the way we're used to, we leave many people to figure this out on their own.

> An LLM can't suffer. So no need to get one's knickers in a twist with mental gymnastics.

On suffering specifically, I offer you the following experiment. Run an LLM in a tool loop that measures some value and call it a "suffering value." You then feed that value back into the model with every message, explicitly telling it how much it is "suffering." The behavior you'll get is pain avoidance. So yes, the LLM probably doesn't feel anything, but its responses will still differ depending on the level of pain encoded in the context.

And I'll reiterate: normal computer systems don't behave this way. If we keep pretending that LLMs don't exhibit behavior that mimics or approximates human behavior, we won't make much progress and we lose people. This is especially problematic for people who haven't spent much time working with these systems. They won't share the view that this is "just a machine."

You can already see this in how many people interact with ChatGPT: they treat it like a therapist, a virtual friend to share secrets with. You don't do that with a machine.

So yes, I think it would be better to find terms that clearly define this as something that has human-like tendencies and something that sets it apart from a stereo or a coffee maker.