The anthropomorphic view of LLM is a much better representation and compression for most types of discussions and communication. A purely mathematical view is accurate but it isn’t productive for the purpose of the general public’s discourse.
I’m thinking a legal systems analogy, at the risk of a lossy domain transfer: the laws are not written as lambda calculus. Why?
And generalizing to social science and humanities, the goal shouldn’t be finding the quantitative truth, but instead understand the social phenomenon using a consensual “language” as determined by the society. And in that case, the anthropomorphic description of the LLM may gain validity and effectiveness as the adoption grows over time.
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