Comment by troad
2 months ago
> I think that people tend to forget what LLMs really are. [...] They do not have a plan, they do not have thoughts of their own.
> A LLM is smart enough to [...]
I thought this was an interesting juxtaposition. I think we humans just naturally anthropomorphise everything, and even when we know not to, we do anyway.
Your analysis is correct, I think. The reason we find this behaviour frightening is because it appears to indicate some kind of malevolent intent, but there's no malevolence nor intent here, just probabilistic regurgitation of tropes.
We've distilled humanity to a grainy facsimile of its most mediocre traits, and now find ourselves alarmed and saddened by what has appeared in the mirror.
> We've distilled humanity to a grainy facsimile of its most mediocre traits, and now find ourselves alarmed and saddened by what has appeared in the mirror.
I think it's important to point out that this seems to be a near universal failing when humans attempt to examine themselves critically as well. Jung called it the shadow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology) "The shadow can be thought of as the blind spot of the psyche."
There lives everything we do but don't openly acknowledge.
Beautifully written. Interestingly, humans also don't know definitively where their own thoughts arise from
Have you considered throwing your thoughts down in longer form essays on the subject somewhere? With all the slop and hype, we need all the eloquence we can get.
You had me at "probablistic regurgitation of tropes", and then you went for the whole "grainy facsimile" bit. Sheesh.