Let's Stop Treating LLMs like People

As we build systems whose capabilities more and more resemble those of humans, despite the fact that those systems work in ways that are fundamentally different from the way humans work, it becomes increasingly tempting to anthropomorphise them. Humans have evolved to co-exist over many millions of years, and human culture has evolved over thousand

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When people make sweeping statements like “language models are bullshit machines” or “ChatGPT lies,” it usually tells me they’re not seriously engaged in any kind of AI/ML work or productive discourse in this space.

First, because saying a machine “lies” or “bullshits” implies motivated intent in a social context, which language models don’t have. M... See more

A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions. We have been doing this for as long a... See more