It is very hard for humans not to anthropomorphize. I was just talking to my cat, who is alive but not human, a small flesh-based neural network that purrs. I know that she is not human, but I map her movements and expression onto human ones, because it's satisfying and improves the relationship. We must imagine kittyphus happy.

An LLM is not a pet, but there are definitely people out there treating it like one, and I am not sure how well this is going to work out for them. Not because it is wrong to treat a text box you can hold a conversation with as a conversation partner, but because the capacity to activate the weirder corners of human expression - obsession and delusion - seems to be much higher. And it's an unknown quantity.

I would also like to introduce HN to what I'm calling the Brian Conley test: if you can see a hand up the back, it's a puppet. That is, a lot of LLM interaction is gated through businesses run by humans with profit motives and unclear morality, and you need to proceed accordingly or you'll get scammed.