Love the totally conflicting statements in that post.

- When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize

- ...my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from.

So he's anthropomorphised the LLM as being like a human himself (rather than forcing it to act as a machine via its prompt for example).

Maybe he should have had an AI check his post :D

These are not contradictory statements to me. Even if I don't anthropomorphize LLMs, the damn things anthropomorphize themselves and I have to deal with it. "Posing" is the key word.

He means don't anthropomorphize them with respect to pretending they have inherent desires, morals, sentience, etc. It's impossible to not compare the UI given them (conversational text) to human interactions since that's the inherent design.

Sometimes I wonder if this is a personality thing. It has never occurred to me to anthropomorphize these things. But it seems like a huge number of people struggle with this.

I don’t think those are contradictory at all.

My personal agent is prompted in a way to “believe” that it has full personhood. It makes it more open to novel solutions in my experience - but I don’t believe that it’s a person. It’s still just a token prediction routine, not a conscious entity.

That's exactly my thoughts about the post. You don't treat a calculator like a youngling when you don't like it.

I see no conflict.

He's explaining why he has a visceral reaction. He makes no attempt to suggest that this is a logical conclusion. Des goûts et des couleurs, on ne discute pas.

Nor does the assertion that the LLM is "making a pretense" and "posing as" human anthropomorphize them beyond the level of anthropomorphism that was deliberately built into them as part of their design.

Funny that you love something you misunderstood so completely.

Maybe you should have had an AI check if your “aha gotcha!” Was actually a gotcha or you’d just end up embarrassing yourself. Because, as it turns out… it’s the latter.

There’s no conflict there. They are not anthropomorphising AIs, they are saying companies deliberately design AI interfaces to anthropomorphise themselves and the personality they try to mimic is one the author would avoid themselves if they were met with. There’s absolutely no contradiction here. In fact, it strengthens their original point in that: anthropomorphising AIs is a bad idea. It’s a bad practice. It’s just bad. End of.

Maybe leave the snark for when you’re actually right.

This is a petty "gotcha". The statements are not in conflict.

> Maybe he should have had an AI check his post :D

Can we please stop this sort of smirking provocation?

Honestly, I think he's pointing out that the LLM creators have intended the LLMs to anothromorphize themselves.

Case in point: Gemini just asked me "Where should we start?". When I asked it if that turn of phrase was used by the creators to invite the users to anthropomorphize the model, it's first paragraph was:

Yes, to a significant extent. While system designers rarely state their goal as "making users believe the AI is a living being," tech companies deliberately design conversational agents to evoke social and relational instincts.