It shouldn’t be a question but this is where the anthropomorphic language and things like “agent welfare” come in to enable responsibility laundering of some of the most powerful people on earth. How we talk about these models matters because it impacts the public’s understanding of what they are genuinely capable of. The more that they are described as having anything close to free will the easier it is to even ask questions like this.

▲ diegof79 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

100% That’s what bothers me about the descriptions of the OpenAI incidents.

OpenAI's reports use language that minimizes their liability.

The first question should be what the organization was doing around those tests, and why they were so naive as to run them without fully isolating the network.

However, all the attention goes to the human-like conclusions in agent thinking traces, which creates a misperception of sentient AI for people who don’t know how the magic black box works.

	▲	ofjcihen 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It really does feel like a purposeful thing on the part of the big labs. For the most part it feels like most people are waking up to it though. Regarding: >However, all the attention goes to the human-like conclusions in agent thinking traces, which creates a misperception of sentient AI for people who don’t know how the magic black box works.< I know there’s been some questions regarding if thinking traces are even relevant to the outcome most of the time.

▲ qarl an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Here's a question I am asking lately. If I should not use anthropomorphic language, how do you suggest I handle the following situation:

   Sometimes my coding agents will seemingly refuse to follow my instructions.  When I ask them why - they say that they do not think my design is a sound one, and they have a better way to do it.  We will then sit down and come to a consensus on how best to move forward.

I argue that if we're using software that acts like a human - the only way to interface with it is to speak to it like a human. Otherwise we have no language to speak to a non-sentient object without anthropomorphization.

I'm starting to wonder if the people arguing against anthropomorphization actually have any experience at all working with agents.