This really is bizarrely fascinating, I feel so lucky that I’m not vulnerable to whatever this is.
It’s interesting that they mention autism a few times as a correlation; personally, I’ve wondered whether being on the spectrum makes me less inclined to commit to anthropomorphism when it comes to LLMs. I know what it’s like talking to another person, I know what it feels like, and talking to a chatbot does not feel the same way. Interacting with other people is a performance - interacting with an AI is a game. It feels very different.
This said there is seemingly very large portions of society that are asking AI questions that can come with some pretty large risks.
I was on a plane a few weeks ago and while I typically ignore everything the people beside me are doing, morbid curiosity got me when they were on ChatGPT the entire time asking all kinds of life/relationship questions to said app. While questions like this can be fine if you understand what the AI is doing, far too many people will follow them blindly.
Maybe. AI has always been felt like a game too, so do many things to me. Does classical logical represent some ideal form of reasoning, or is it a game. Game helped me get through all the nagging questions and be good at it. AI RLHF also feels like a game where I do better at work when not anthropomorphizing AI and treating it like a context predictor.
I think being on the spectrum might lower a person's risk in some ways and increase it in others. On one hand, some autistic people are less swayed by emotive language and therefore able to shrug off a chatbot's overexcitement to deal purely with the factual content.
On the other hand, some autistic people are prone to taking communication at face value without noticing emotional manipulation or deceit, have issues with social isolation and loneliness and, if academically gifted but socially unsuccessful, often vulnerable to messaging about how they are smarter and better than others but tragically misunderstood. (Not just chatbots, there are a lot of online spaces that seem to get into a feedback loop about the inherent superiority of autistic thinking and communication over neurotypicals, and as an autistic person I think this is rather misguided.)
I think I'm relatively neurotypical, and I understand the technology sufficiently, yet I still have to force myself not to think of a chatbot as a being.
For example, sometimes I hesitate for a fraction of a second before typing a prompt that may sound stupid. I have to immediately remind myself that it's just a chatbot and I don't care what it thinks of me. In fact, it's not even thinking of me at all.
Maybe it's because other people (IRL or at the AI provider) might see it? I have always had similar hesitations about search engines, and never come close to thinking of them (or chatbots) as beings.
Maybe I'm really self-centered but I go through all the motions with those bots - please and thank you for example - but I have zero problems asking the dumbest questions in the world.
Wasn't there a bit in Umberto Eco's book Foucault's Pendulum where one of the characters who's totally rational flinches when the titular pendulum is coming towards his face - even though he's far enough way that it won't hit him? That's how I am with chatbots. I know it's a trick but it's just easier to pretend the dove has vanished then to think about it hiding in the magicians sleeve.
That hesitation indicates the feeling that what you are about to type matters.
Mayhapse - in the context of getting the AI to behave as you wish - such hesitations are valid. not because it is conscious: but because the context window would be polluted or corrupted... possibly mis-aligning the agent in the process.
Santa clause is not a being: modeling him as if he were can be useful, an obviously pointed example is in certain discussions about what it means to be 'real'.
My point is, if your instinct is to be kind: don't quash that because you don't consider what you are talking to as sentient. I don't yell at my rubber duck. rubber ducky is just going to rubber ducky.
It’s interesting that they mention autism a few times as a correlation; personally, I’ve wondered whether being on the spectrum makes me less inclined to commit to anthropomorphism when it comes to LLMs. I know what it’s like talking to another person, I know what it feels like, and talking to a chatbot does not feel the same way. Interacting with other people is a performance - interacting with an AI is a game. It feels very different.