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viccistoday at 5:17 AM1 replyview on HN

It's bad to anthropomorphize it when judging its capabilities, but useful when analyzing its behavior, as it can be best thought of something behaving as close as possible as a real subject would. If it "acts delighted" that's because it's effectively telling a story about a person who is excited at the opportunity of accomplishing something more easily.

This is even more apparent if you read this post closely. Look at that personality prompt. It's going to effectively tell a story and start to imagine itself in a role. If that prompt said "Talk like a pirate", it wouldn't be bad for you to say it's acting like a pirate.

Anthropomorphizing themselves is at the core of how these things work, sometimes in subtle ways.


Replies

TuringTesttoday at 8:24 AM

> If it "acts delighted" that's because it's effectively telling a story about a person who is excited at the opportunity of accomplishing something more easily.

That's spot-on. It is a mistake to think that LLMs have human feelings. Their behaviour is based on narrative descriptions learnt from human texts, without experiencing those feelings first-hand.

A useful way to understand them is as systems that write stories about human characters. We know the characters are fictional and no one is actually experiencing those feelings, but we can still judge whether the portrayal is realistic or whether it contains logical or emotional inconsistencies.