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.

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zephen 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

My daughter is a pediatrician and just gave a talk on mental health problems (including suicides) brought on by the sort of personality that succumbs to this.

I find it interesting. For most of my life, I have gotten on well with (well-designed) machines. I'm the sort of guy who, when they bring me in to show me what's broken, it works in front of me.

Maybe I get on with well-designed machines better than people. Because people are never well-designed. So, when LLMs are working properly, I get along well with them, but when they're not, I'm unhappy. But I never confuse any of my machines for people.

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sanderjd 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah to me it's just "oh what a nice interface for compressing information and accessing it upon request!", not at all "I'm talking to a person". But I dunno, maybe we're the weird ones.

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zephen 2 days ago | parent [-]

I know I'm weird.

I remember watching my brother get frustrated with a dysfunctional remote control. He threw it forcefully enough at a stone fireplace to shatter it.

From my perspective, that, in and of itself, is a mild form of anthropomorphism — trying to inflict pain on the object.

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andrewflnr 2 days ago | parent [-]

That's a very... bleak perspective on your brother's motives. Sometimes you just want to get rid of an object that causes frustration. When that attitude is applied to humans, we usually call it a symptom of dehumanization.

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zephen 2 days ago | parent [-]

> That's a very... bleak perspective on your brother's motives.

Well, it may have been an overstatement, but not by much. Look, I have anger issues, but I never get angry at things because they are never trying to hurt me, and nothing good can come of it. I could probably fix most remote control issues (e.g. bad battery contact), but not after it's been smashed.

I also tend to feel the same way about, e.g., a rabid dog or vermin. Get rid of them, but not in anger.

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andrewflnr 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not saying it's rational either way. But getting angry at things is, at least as far as I can tell, normal for most people, without any subconscious idea those things are people.

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zephen a day ago | parent [-]

> But getting angry at things is, at least as far as I can tell, normal for most people.

I can well believe that I am an outlier here. Maybe not everybody else believes that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=zephen#49748843

> without any subconscious idea those things are people.

Right, but there is a subset of anthropomorphism that relates to sentient beings, which is what I was trying to get at. Being angry at something is one thing; wanting to immediately destroy it in anger is possibly another.

I will admit I don't know the exact feelings involved, because I generally don't have them. The closest I come is the anger I feel at the designers of IVR systems that are too stupid to answer your questions and too obstinate to connect you to a human. I admit to yelling at those, but honestly part of that is that I have read that some of them are designed to sense frustration in users and connect you faster to an agent in some cases. But I have no idea how true that is, or whether it's just like pressing the completely impotent "close door" button on an elevator.

	▲	andrewflnr 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Being angry at something is one thing; wanting to immediately destroy it in anger is possibly another. This is a real distinction, yes. I just don't see what it has to do with anthropomorphism. Like maybe you're saying the second one is more often directed at people-like entities? I don't feel that at all.

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osiejfiejf 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> So, when LLMs are working properly, I get along well with them, but when they're not, I'm unhappy.

So… you think yourself “different” while acting like everyone else does when something doesn’t go as planned (unhappiness/sadness/disappointment/whatever)?

I smell LinkedIn-flavoured-humble-brag.

	▲	zephen 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I smell LinkedIn-flavoured-humble-brag. Smell whatever you want; it's a free country. The "machines like me" is not a humble brag. It's an observed phenomenon, not just by me. The "I'm different in how I react to them" probably doesn't put me at odds with the entire population, but certainly puts me at odds with a lot of individuals I have witnessed. If you read my other comments, you'd see me contrasting myself with people who get angry with machines. I don't do that. For whatever reason, I reserve anger for sentient beings who I believe are trying to fuck with me. That has its own set of problems, but I never have the problem of destroying inanimate objects in anger. > So… you think yourself “different” Yes. > while acting like everyone else does That's the point. I know for a fact that not everybody acts like me, never mind having the same facility with machines as I do.

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Retr0id 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I suspect harness and usage modality is a big factor. Personally I disable all "memory" features wherever possible. I don't want the LLM to "get to know me", or any illusion thereof, which I assume helps with not anthropomorphizing it.

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sanderjd 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I use memory all the time so that I can ask it about things. That doesn't mean it "knows me" any more than my notes documents do, it's just more convenient to search.

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zephen 2 days ago | parent [-]

> That doesn't mean it "knows me" any more than my notes documents do

But are you happy handing over your notes documents to mass aggregators of information?

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sanderjd 2 days ago | parent [-]

In general, yes.

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zephen 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'd be happy doing it 99.99% of the time myself, but I don't want to form the habit to think it's a good thing to do.

	▲	sanderjd a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I don't think we disagree that much about this. But I'm not really worried about this particular habit forming risk. I can see where you're coming from though.

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zephen 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I do the same.

But frankly, I mostly use (greenfield, non-remembering) LLMs directly to counteract the enshittification of search brought on by attempts to use AI to remember things about me (and especially to sell me things).

This works well for me because (a) I'm usually using my desktop, and (b) I'm a touch-typist. I want to say that my search results have gotten back to where they were a decade or more ago by doing this, even though I often have to give a couple of prompts in order to get the LLM to provide me a useful link.

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sanderjd 2 days ago | parent [-]

I guess I'm also pretty skeptical of the "automatically remember things about me" functionality. But I really like being able to say "hey make sure to remember this fact" and being able to ask about those things later.

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rsfern 2 days ago | parent [-]

For me the convenience of “hey remember this fact” is outweighed by a desire not to get stuck in a search or context bubble.

It might be nice to have better UI to control which bits of history get added to the context of a chat, but then just use a coding harness instead of web UI

	▲	sanderjd 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe. But I don't just use it for coding. For instance one thing I use it for is helping me track and evolve my workouts over time. It helps that it can remember the weight and number of reps I did the previous time. I could make an app for this, but it works well to do it purely within chat, with memory, and that's convenient. This is just an example, I use it this way for a number of things. I'm not going to use a coding harness for this kind of trivial use case!

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coffeefirst 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes. It’s called the ELIZA Effect. It’s fascinating, and arguably the most dangerous thing about these models given how many people it seems to affect.