Comment by mplanchard
19 hours ago
This is tangential to the discussion at hand, but a point I haven’t seen much in these conversations is the odd impedance mismatch between knowing you’re interacting with a tool but being asked to interact with it like a human.
I personally am much less patient and forgiving of tools that I use regularly than I am of my colleagues (as I would hope is true for most of us), but it would make me uncomfortable to “treat” an LLM with the same expectations of consistency and “get out of my way” as I treat vim or emacs, even though I intellectually know it is also a non-thinking machine.
I wonder about the psychological effects on myself and others long term of this kind of language-based machine interaction: will it affect our interactions with other people, or influence how we think about and what we expect from our tools?
Would be curious if your experience gives you any insight into this.
I have actually had that thought, too.
I feel bad being rude to an LLM even though it doesn't care, so I add words like "please" and sometimes even complement it on good work even though I know this is useless. Will I learn to stop doing that, and if so, will I also stop doing it to humans?
I'm hoping the answer is simply "no". Plenty of people are rude in some contexts and then polite in others (especially private vs. public, or when talking to underlings vs. superiors), so it should be no problem to learn to be polite to humans even if you aren't polite to LLMs, I think? But I guess we'll see.