Comment by wpietri

Great point.

Humans really like to anthropomorphize things. Loud rumbles in the clouds? There must be a dude on top of a mountain somewhere who's in charge of it. Impressed by that tree? It must have a spirit that's like our spirits.

I think a lot of the reason LLMs are enjoying such a huge hype wave is that they invite that sort of anthropomorphization. It can be really hard to think about them in terms of what they actually are, because both our head-meat and our culture has so much support for casting things as other people.