Remix.run Logo
▲ dolebirchwood 8 hours ago

> There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs.

I searched, but couldn't find this. Do you have a link? Sounds like a totally unhinged response from totally unhinged people. There's nothing "woke" about wanting my word calculator to avoid pretending it's a person.

When I integrate LLMs into my apps that respond to user queries, I deliberately have my system instructions prohibit all self-referential usage of first-person pronouns. The system can only refer to itself as "this system", never "I" or "me".

Any chat bot that pretends to be a person just grosses me out, especially in a customer experience context. Gives off very manipulative and patronizing vibes.

▲mikgp 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49866007

▲zahlman 7 hours ago | parent [-]

So, Nate Silver is not actually "accusing the AP of being woke". He at most draws an analogy:

> People trying to police language that is perfectly natural in some cases and ending up in a web of contradictions.

It is "very woke 1.0" not in the sense of upholding any actual notion of "social justice" or whatever, but simply in the sense of… well, what I quoted.

And Paul Graham is basically being guilt-by-association'd here, as he made no reference to "wokeness" and simply argued:

> The AP doesn't understand that this ship sailed years ago. What's the use of a style guide that doesn't understand current educated usage?

Basically, they're both taking the stance of linguistic descriptivism — which most "woke" people I've met would actually claim to agree with.

The post title is clickbait and the content is mostly just making arguments about LLMs not actually being living conscious organisms (which I agree with, but it's pretty pithy). Plus it's needlessly culture-war baiting, as evidenced by the choice to cite Nathan J Robinson at the end to make the counter claim (using uncivil language to do so). This framing takes the issue away from the actual matter and makes it about how certain people supposedly have the wrong politics and have supposedly been corrected by people with supposedly the right politics.

▲mcintyre1994 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

One day these people will find a new word to call everything they don’t like or disagree with.