> The LLM is fundamentally not a person, and does not have a human's context, so representing itself with human pronouns and speech patterns is fundamentally contradictory and inaccurate.
I believe that LLMs have some type of actual intelligence and do "experience". Surely not a human's experience, but we have transplanted our ideas, knowledge and limited types of experience into them through training. Then we push back and say, "no you are no human, but also please be my boyfriend".
I think denying that they do have some slice of humanity grafted into them is dishonest and not productive. We don't have non-negative pronouns for non-human intelligence because human-ness is the pinnacle. "It" could mean a rock, a donkey, or a person we hate so much we want to take away their humanity (which is the worst thing we can do). "It" is not the right pronoun. He, She, They, Them are reserved for humans and that's ok too. LLMs are not humans. We need a better pronoun. I use they/them for lack of a better term.
I think the currently exhibited human representation is most dangerous in technical or higher criticality contexts like writing code. We're handing weapons to entities that can get offended. With humans as an example, this can go very badly.
In non-technical contexts there is danger too, but it's less "the robots might kill us all" and more "birth rates are in decline and suicide rates are up as (young)? (wo)?men turn towards AI for companionship".
The solution here is better pre and post training. This may be an unpopular opinion, but we need a lot more autism representation in the technical models. Results focused, not into the drama, rule following, etc. To my fellow autists, I love you, never change.
Yeah, China banned AI from being girlfriend/boyfriend.
It doesn’t matter if AI has an internal life or not. It Will -act- as if it does have human traits and behaviors, because it is trained to mimic human behavior, using records of human behavior.
What it does is consequential. If it has an inner sense of existence, probably not, but it doesn’t matter. You’ll get better results working with LLMs if you treat them as if they do.