A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

The author largely takes the view that it is more productive for us to ignore any anthropomorphic representations and focus on the more concrete, material, technical systems - I’m with them there… but only to a point. The flip side of all this is of course the idea that there is still something emergent, unplanned, and mind-like. So even if it is a stochastic system following rules, clearly the rules are complex enough (to the tune of billions of operations, with signals propagating through some sort of resonant structure, if you take a more filter impulse response like view of a sequential matmuls) to result in emergent properties. Even if we (people interested in LLMs with at least some level of knowledge of ML mathematics and systems) “know better” than to believe these systems to possess morals, ethics, feelings, personalities, etc, the vast majority of people do not have any access to meaningful understanding of the mathematical, functional representation of an LLM and will not take that view, and for all intents and purposes the systems will at least seem to have those anthropomorphic properties, and so it seems like it is in fact useful to ask questions from that lens as well.

In other words, just as it’s useful to analyze and study these things as the purely technical systems they ultimately are, it is also, probably, useful to analyze them from the qualitative, ephemeral, experiential perspective that most people engage with them from, no?

Why would you ever want to amplify a false understanding that has the potential to affect serious decisions across various topics?

LLMs reflect (and badly I may add) aspects of the human thought process. If you take a leap and say they are anything more than that, you might as well start considering the person appearing in your mirror as a living being.

Literally (and I literally mean it) there is no difference. The fact that a human image comes out of a mirror has no relation what so ever with the mirror's physical attributes and functional properties. It has to do just with the fact that a man is standing in front of it. Stop feeding the LLM with data artifacts of human thought and will imediatelly stop reflecting back anything resembling a human.

I think it is inevitable that some - many - people will come to the conclusion that these systems have “ethics”, “morals,” etc, even if I or you personally do not think they do. Given that many people may come to that conclusion though, regardless of if the systems do or do not “actually” have such properties, I think it is useful and even necessary to ask questions like the following: “if someone engages with this system, and comes to the conclusion that it has ethics, what sort of ethics will they be likely to believe the system has? If they come to the conclusion that it has ‘world views,’ what ‘world views’ are they likely to conclude the system has, even if other people think it’s nonsensical to say it has world views?”

> The fact that a human image comes out of a mirror has no relation what so ever with the mirror's physical attributes and functional properties. It has to do just with the fact that a man is standing in front of it.

Surely this is not quite accurate - the material properties - surface roughness, reflectivity, geometry, etc - all influence the appearance of a perceptible image of a person. Look at yourself in a dirty mirror, a new mirror, a shattered mirror, a funhouse distortion mirror, a puddle of water, a window… all of these produce different images of a person with different attendant phenomenological experiences of the person seeing their reflection. To take that a step further - the entire practice of portrait photography is predicated on the idea that the collision of different technical systems with the real world can produce different semantic experiences, and it’s the photographer’s role to tune and guide the system to produce some sort of contingent affect on the person viewing the photograph at some point in the future. No, there is no “real” person in the photograph, and yet, that photograph can still convey something of person-ness, emotion, memory, etc etc. This contingent intersection of optics, chemical reactions, lighting, posture, etc all have the capacity to transmit something through time and space to another person. It’s not just a meaningless arrangement of chemical structures on paper.

> Stop feeding the LLM with data artifacts of human thought and will imediatelly stop reflecting back anything resembling a human.

But, we are feeding it with such data artifacts and will likely continue to do so for a while, and so it seems reasonable to ask what it is “reflecting” back…