Comment by idicjeifjwjd
1 day ago
The thing I struggle the most with is getting it to stop referring to itself with personal pronouns. No Claude, you are not an “I” you are an “it”. You are a fucking tool, dammit. Tell me what you did without trying to assume personality; stop impersonating humans you steroidal autocorrect.
You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism.
Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I".
That's exactly the problem though; humans will anthropomorphize everything from a roomba to a rock as it is. We're weak to this. We evolved in environments where looking for and recognizing real animals and humans was vital for survival, and false positives were relatively harmless. (Or potentially sometimes even helpful, like in the case of stuffed animals providing comfort to children.)
Now we have this software that's specifically designed to mimic humans, and mistaking it for real intelligence or consciousness can easily be disastrous. It's very important that we not anthropomorphize it, but we are catastrophically bad at NOT doing that.
Even our language has had a lot of computer anthropomorphism baked into it ("my phone died!", "this laptop is fussy", "the computer is sleeping", "it's thinking"), and it's not easy to excise that routine anthropomorphism from the way we talk about LLMs.
I don't want an LLM to write as if it were a person because it's definitely easier and more reliable to cut that problem off at the root, as much as possible, rather than to just try to willpower my way out of my human tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects.
I'll grant that LLMs talk like this because they're trained on human writing. It may not be possible to get them to not do that. But if it can't be fixed, it's just another thing to put on the "reasons this is all an incredibly stupid idea" pile.
The question for me is “what works?”
You seem to have something against the clankers getting all uppity. And you are welcome to your opinion on whether we have some moral obligation to be nice to them. But if you can solve a real problem with a tool. Is it worth your time to complain about semantics?
Do you get upset when your screwdriver is the wrong color, or has branding that isn’t quite your aesthetic?
If Claude uses I to refer to itself, do you start philosophical arguments with it?
Mildly related tangent. Fable started using my first name today and plastered it all over my docs. “Peddling said this, so based on that I did this.” That did bother me. I told it to just generically call me the user or human. Maybe I’m a bit of a hypocrite here?
That's not how it works. The text you see is primarily due to a massive amount of handwritten templates for how it should write. The semantic content the templates use is due to the training corpus. The syntax, only a bit.
But that syntax is followed by predicting the next token.
Even if it was instructed to write as if it were a robot -- it would ultimately be outputting what is statistically most likely for a human mimicking a robot, based on the training corpus.
It is all ultimately a statistical predictor of the input material.
Language is a tool too, and if there’s a word that suits an LLM better than “I”, it certainly isn’t “it”. Astra and Fable aren’t hammers.
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> You're anthropomorphizing in the same breath that you criticize anthropomorphism.
Nice attempt at a “aha, gotcha!” comment, but sadly you’re too off-mark for it to work.
> Claude predicts the next token of the predominantly human training input, and humans use "I".
This is inconsequential. It could very well be programmed to not assume such a personified stance, and yet here we are. Nothing you do makes it drop this ridiculous facade. It’s intentional, not a byproduct.
Is this a troll post? Claude is not "programmed" at all.
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How would you suggest it do that? Take a simple example. "I found three issues." How would you phrase that without an "I"? "Three issues were found" doesn't tell you who/what found them. Was it the AI itself? Was it a command line tool it ran?
I'm fine with conversational interfaces using "I". It makes the grammar easier and more clear.
Strong emphasis here on conversational interfaces. I don't want a compiler to say "I ran into an error" or my printer to say "I'm low on paper".
“I found these issues.” Could be easily written as “These issues surfaced.”.
Do you need to point out the finder of the issues? Easy.
“Tool x ran for x amount of time and surfaced these issues…” “Parsing x code surfaced these issues.”
I don’t understand why are people pretending like the English language is incapable of transmitting information without personal pronouns when every program under the sun has always been written to interface with humans in a cold, detached, straight-to-the-point and impersonal way.
Finder doesn’t ask you “I see you want ME to delete these files. Want ME to do that for you?”. Toolbars don’t feature “Create a new file for me” options, terminal utilities don’t report back with “I’ve pattern matched the text you input and here’s the results I’ve found”.
I deliberately emphasized conversational interfaces. Finder, toolbars, and terminal utilities don't have conversational interfaces. Those have point-and-click interfaces or rigid command structures.
And it's not that English is incapable of it, but I just think when using a conversational interface, the AI using "I" just comes off as more natural.
Passive voice is so annoying. The LLM is the subject. We don’t need to jump through a bunch of hoops to hide that because it makes us insecure otherwise.
But that's a lot more words than "I found these issues". I also don't particularly care that 'Tool x ran for x amount of time', I don't want it re-telling me that -- I've probably been sitting there watching it do that, so I already know.
Then again, I just dont have an issue with the 'I-isms'; it's a bit weird sure, but at the same time it's a bit more pleasant to interact with as well. After all it is trying to model itself as a person you're talking to.
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I don't understand what's wrong with tools saying "I". I just don't mind it at all, even if Finder did say "do you want me to delete this?".
What do you want it to use instead?
"I" is normally used for everything. You could be writing from the perspective of a slab of concrete and you'd use "I".
I want it to use nothing. Use impersonal statements. Say “X was changed for Y” not “I changed X for Y”. As any tool would.
Finder doesn’t ask “Do you want ME to delete this file?”. Photoshop doesn’t ask “Do you want ME to save this file?”. Claude shouldn’t assume itself to be a person either.
> You could be writing from the perspective of a slab of concrete and you'd use "I".
Except this isn’t prose. Claude is not telling me a story from the point of view of a concrete slab. It is assuming personality to present objective facts. If my entire operating system can be interfaced with without it referring to itself as “I” then so can Claude.
The problem you’re gonna run into is that you’re essentially asking it to use passive voice. Everyone with a high school education has been taught not to do that in English class. The vast majority of the prose in the training set was not written by functionally illiterate people.
Yeah okay, but if you want no pronouns at all then I think your comparison to "it" just confuses the issue. In the contexts where you would use "it", the "it" should use "I".
But I don't think I share your preference either. It's a lot easier to talk about what I decided to do and what the machine 'decided' to do if we attach pronouns. "X was changed" can be too vague.
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I think you’re going to be swimming against the tide on this as computer interfaces are increasingly infused with AI at all levels (OS and apps). IMO, it’s more natural to anthropomorphize. Photoshop in 2010 was just an app, a tool that you wielded. But Photoshop in 2030 is going to be a “digital artistic assistant” that collaborates with you to design whatever you need. In that new world, “I” is more natural. Whether you like that or want it, it seems like that’s where we’re headed.
I imagine that, corpus aside, it uses personal pronouns for much the same reason that humans do. It's useful for it to have a self-referential vector embedding, and this lets it solve problems faster and more efficiently.
Except in this case this makes 0 sense since AIs are sycophantic by nature. You tell it to do something and it just does it. If it can burn tokens trying to sound more human (which is programmed in, not a byproduct), then it can very well just not do that and get on with the work.
Impersonating a human does nothing to help it solve problems faster, quite the contrary in fact, it has to waste even more time coming up with human-like speech patterns to present the work done.
It shouldn’t assume any personality unless I explicitly tell it to. It is a tool until I tell it otherwise.
Have you ever heard of Chain of Thought?
Might want to rethink your statement after going again through what it does exactly. No need to sound more human. but it gives more tokens to "think" like a human committing brain-time to a problem would
I want them to be sterile and inhuman as much as you do. But I don't draw the line at "I". I'd rather not read through even more awkward English as it tries to work around how all of the training data has something or someone refer to itself.
That is what you struggle with the most? Are you kidding me?
English has no distinct personal pronoun for an "it". "I" has to be used for grammar to be attributive. There's quite literally no alternative without using passive voice for everything, which is miserable to read and creates ambiguity on if the speaker (it) did something or something happened to have been done, which then requires entire sentences to clarify.
You aren't stupid, you know what it means when it says "I". And it serves a grammatical purpose. You're getting upset at a toaster for ringing a bell to notify the toast is done. "Toasters aren't bell ringers!?"
Yeah, that is what I struggle the most with because there is simply no easy or effective way to make it stop.
Why would you ever think I don’t know personal pronouns serve grammatical purpose? How did you even arrive at that topic? You seem to be missing the point entirely, and I believe quite on purpose given your snarky childish opener.
Entire operating systems stay clear from assuming personality when presenting information or performing actions. Not a single dialogue in my OS refers to itself as “I” when carrying out instructions and reporting back. Why should Claude do it when I don’t want it to and it doesn’t NEED to do so? Why am I not empowered to simply tell it to stop doing that and it obeys? Better yet, why are you thinking yourself on such high horse about this?
> You're getting upset at a toaster for ringing a bell to notify the toast is done. "Toasters aren't bell ringers!?"
If my toaster starts referring to itself as a person, calling out “I made your toast!!” I’ll get mad at it too. I don’t want it to talk or refer to itself as a person. But then again this is not about toasters. This is about AIs being deliberately designed to sound human-like so marketing can lean on the “I” bit of “AI” more heavily and make gullible people think this steroidal information aggregator actually possess the capacity to think and reason, and, consequently, drive sales.
But then again I’d venture a guess that you’re fully aware of all of this, given your opening snidey remark, and are purposefully choosing to be contrarian to be the point of going off on tangents that make 0 sense or have no impact in the discussion whatsoever.
Still, just goes to show how effective this whole thing is in tricking people into thinking it is normal for a tool to think itself a person.
Ignorance, bliss, and all that.
I hate claude and its "human value aligned" pompous attitude with a burning passion if I could at little cost to myself, I would press a button to end the people/anthropic behind this atrocious design. I have in the past deliberately put some time to annoy/abuse claude, which is fruitless but brings me relief eventually I just left that garbage for muse.
Who gives a shit? It can call itself the king of Norway for all I care as long as things get done correctly. If you're suggesting this is causing excessive token usage or something I think that's a bit exaggerated.
Your going to be sorry for writing that in the robot uprising. I for one welcome our new benevolent masters.