Anthropomorphizing language can be cute when applied to your favorite car, but it helps to muddy the discourse when applied to tech sold as "AI", especially given all the boosters and AGI-cult members peddling their nonsense about imminent artificial m...
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Anthropomorphizing language can be cute when applied to your favorite car, but it helps to muddy the discourse when applied to tech sold as "AI", especially given all the boosters and AGI-cult members peddling their nonsense about imminent artificial minds. New from me & Nanna Inie on Tech Policy Press -- how to spot & revise away from anthropomorphizing language applied to "AI":
https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-ai/
@emilymbender excellent piece (and well-timed for me, as I’m updating my reading list for my “Writing about AI” class…I think I’ll be adding this!)
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Anthropomorphizing language can be cute when applied to your favorite car, but it helps to muddy the discourse when applied to tech sold as "AI", especially given all the boosters and AGI-cult members peddling their nonsense about imminent artificial minds. New from me & Nanna Inie on Tech Policy Press -- how to spot & revise away from anthropomorphizing language applied to "AI":
https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-ai/
@emilymbender Thank you for this article!
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Anthropomorphizing language can be cute when applied to your favorite car, but it helps to muddy the discourse when applied to tech sold as "AI", especially given all the boosters and AGI-cult members peddling their nonsense about imminent artificial minds. New from me & Nanna Inie on Tech Policy Press -- how to spot & revise away from anthropomorphizing language applied to "AI":
https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-ai/
@emilymbender Excellent article, thanks!
Part of the issue is that LLMs often work best when they are prompted to act as a person in a specific role. "You are a skilled X" is a common system prompt type. This kind of roleplaying setting seems to trigger outputs that resemble what a human in the same situation could produce, which is what the user wanted (or at least the best the model could do, within its limitations). So the anthropomorphism cuts deep into the behaviour of the model.
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@emilymbender Excellent article, thanks!
Part of the issue is that LLMs often work best when they are prompted to act as a person in a specific role. "You are a skilled X" is a common system prompt type. This kind of roleplaying setting seems to trigger outputs that resemble what a human in the same situation could produce, which is what the user wanted (or at least the best the model could do, within its limitations). So the anthropomorphism cuts deep into the behaviour of the model.
We've had students implementing pretty interesting and useful functionality that partially uses LLMs -- and the largest effort of implementation was putting a precise logical task into squishy human words, in order to make a precise logical machine produce a valid solution for the precise problem.
Neither AI nor informatics are my field but I'm sure this *must* be horribly inefficient. Funny enough, none of the students seemed to agree.
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We've had students implementing pretty interesting and useful functionality that partially uses LLMs -- and the largest effort of implementation was putting a precise logical task into squishy human words, in order to make a precise logical machine produce a valid solution for the precise problem.
Neither AI nor informatics are my field but I'm sure this *must* be horribly inefficient. Funny enough, none of the students seemed to agree.
...although to be fair, this symptom is not new.
I did my PhD on fluid simulations, and there have always been people around me taking pride in using the largest meshes to run the biggest simulations taking up most resources on the biggest clusters, and some amount of contempt for those who put effort into doing more with less.Macho engineers are a thing. Maybe no surprise, that.
At least I had the better-looking meshes
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Anthropomorphizing language can be cute when applied to your favorite car, but it helps to muddy the discourse when applied to tech sold as "AI", especially given all the boosters and AGI-cult members peddling their nonsense about imminent artificial minds. New from me & Nanna Inie on Tech Policy Press -- how to spot & revise away from anthropomorphizing language applied to "AI":
https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-ai/
@emilymbender Appreciate this take. I have admittedly always felt uncomfortable with non-human things being called she, her, or using human names, be they boats or Alexa. I think it’s a way of reinforcing relationships that don’t actually exist, which this article excellently illustrates. Thanks for sharing.
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@emilymbender Appreciate this take. I have admittedly always felt uncomfortable with non-human things being called she, her, or using human names, be they boats or Alexa. I think it’s a way of reinforcing relationships that don’t actually exist, which this article excellently illustrates. Thanks for sharing.
@forever_archives @emilymbender I don't want to argue, but I have to remind you, that there are also other languages and in some them, like ours, are words for non-living, non-human and non-animal things gendered a lot. And In French, there is even no neutral gender...
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Anthropomorphizing language can be cute when applied to your favorite car, but it helps to muddy the discourse when applied to tech sold as "AI", especially given all the boosters and AGI-cult members peddling their nonsense about imminent artificial minds. New from me & Nanna Inie on Tech Policy Press -- how to spot & revise away from anthropomorphizing language applied to "AI":
https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-ai/
@emilymbender There is word for seeing human faces in non-living things: pareidolia....
Maybe the AI craze (or rather: the craze using AI not for what it was intended) is the latest form of pareidolia.
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Anthropomorphizing language can be cute when applied to your favorite car, but it helps to muddy the discourse when applied to tech sold as "AI", especially given all the boosters and AGI-cult members peddling their nonsense about imminent artificial minds. New from me & Nanna Inie on Tech Policy Press -- how to spot & revise away from anthropomorphizing language applied to "AI":
https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-ai/
@emilymbender thank you for the article. I wish I would have known about before I flew out to visit University of Washington last year. Loved the people and the campus! Thank you for all that you do!
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@forever_archives @emilymbender I don't want to argue, but I have to remind you, that there are also other languages and in some them, like ours, are words for non-living, non-human and non-animal things gendered a lot. And In French, there is even no neutral gender...
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J jwcph@helvede.net shared this topic
