Comment by turtletontine
11 hours ago
I feel like I’ve seen more and more people recently fall for this trick. No, LLMs are not “empathetic” or “patient”, and no, they do not have emotions. They’re incredibly huge piles of numbers following their incentives. Their behavior convincingly reproduces human behavior, and they express what looks like human emotions… because their training data is full of humans expressing emotions? Sure, sometimes it’s helpful for their outputs to exhibit a certain affect or “personality”. But falling for the act, and really attributing human emotions to them seems, is alarming to me.
There’s no trick. It’s less about what actually is going on inside the machine and more about the experience the human has. From that lens, yes, they are empathetic.
What are humans made of? Is it anything more special than chemistry and numbers?
Technically they don't have incentives either. It's just difficult to talk about something that walks, swims, flies, and quacks without referring to duck terminology.
Sounds like you aren't aware that a huge amount of human behaviors that look like empathy and patience are not real either. Do you really think all those kind-seeming call-center workers, waitresses, therapists, schoolteachers, etc. actually feel what they're showing? It's mostly an act. Look at how adults fake laughter for an obvious example of popular human emotion-faking.
Its more than that, this pile of numbers argument is really odd. I feel its hard to square this strange idea that piles of numbers are "lesser" than humans unless they are admitting belief in the supernatural .