Don't anthropomorphize LLMs, language is important.
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@gabrielesvelto I mean, it doesn't help that the bots are doing this bullshit: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-12-silence-in-open-source-a-reflection.html
This is clearly intended to trick humans.
I might have missed a chapter but my interpretation is someone has prompted their llm to generate this text and then posted it no? The way I saw this narrated is like the llm reacted to the prompt "PR closed" by creating a blog post. But to do that, you need an human operator no?
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Don't anthropomorphize LLMs, language is important. Say "the bot generated some text" not "the AI replied". Use "this document contains machine-generated text" not "this work is AI-assisted". See how people squirm when you call out their slop this way.
@gabrielesvelto Even describing their errors as hallucinations is the same attempt to humanize it.
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I might have missed a chapter but my interpretation is someone has prompted their llm to generate this text and then posted it no? The way I saw this narrated is like the llm reacted to the prompt "PR closed" by creating a blog post. But to do that, you need an human operator no?
@kinou @Andres4NY not necessarily, or at least not as a follow-up. The operator might have primed the bot to follow this course of action in the original prompt, and included all the necessary permissions to let it publish the generated post automatically.
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@gabrielesvelto Even describing their errors as hallucinations is the same attempt to humanize it.
@bit absolutely, and it gives people the impression that they have failure modes, which they don't. Their output is text which they cannot verify, so whether the text is factually right or wrong is irrelevant. Both are valid and completely expected outputs.
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Don't anthropomorphize LLMs, language is important. Say "the bot generated some text" not "the AI replied". Use "this document contains machine-generated text" not "this work is AI-assisted". See how people squirm when you call out their slop this way.
@gabrielesvelto “This Document Contains Machine Generated Text” but it’s a pair of knuckle dusters with typewriter caps.
The document is yo binch as -
I might have missed a chapter but my interpretation is someone has prompted their llm to generate this text and then posted it no? The way I saw this narrated is like the llm reacted to the prompt "PR closed" by creating a blog post. But to do that, you need an human operator no?
@kinou @Andres4NY @gabrielesvelto
Not necessarily, it just needs access to a blog post making API and some training data that got it to auto complete "I got my PR rejected because it was garbage" with "and then wrote a blog post about it".
A lot of people have provided that training data
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Don't anthropomorphize LLMs, language is important. Say "the bot generated some text" not "the AI replied". Use "this document contains machine-generated text" not "this work is AI-assisted". See how people squirm when you call out their slop this way.
@gabrielesvelto@mas.to
Even talking about "text", in the context of #LLM, is a subtle anthropomorphization.
Text is a sequence of symbols used by human minds to express information that they want to syncronize a little with other human minds (aka communicate).
Such syncronization is always partial and imperfect, since each mind has different experiences and informations that will integrate the new message, but it's good enough to allow humanity to collaborate and to build culture and science.
A statistically programmed software has no mind, so even when it's optimized to produce output that can fool a human and pass the #Turing test, such output hold no meaning, since no human experience or thought is expressed there.
It's just the partial decompression of a lossy compression of a huge amount of text. And if it wasn't enough to show the lack of any meaning, the decompression process includes random input that is there to provide the illusion of autonomy.
So instead of "the AI replied" I'd suggest "the bot computed this output" and instead of "this work is AI-assisted" I'd suggest "this is statistically computed output".
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@kinou @Andres4NY not necessarily, or at least not as a follow-up. The operator might have primed the bot to follow this course of action in the original prompt, and included all the necessary permissions to let it publish the generated post automatically.
@gabrielesvelto @kinou Yeah, it's unclear how much of this is human-directed, and how much is automated. Like, if a bot is trained on aggressive attempts to get patches merged, then that's the behavior it will emulate. Or an actual human could be directing it to act like an asshole in an attempt to get patches merged.
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Don't anthropomorphize LLMs, language is important. Say "the bot generated some text" not "the AI replied". Use "this document contains machine-generated text" not "this work is AI-assisted". See how people squirm when you call out their slop this way.
@gabrielesvelto
Yes
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Don't anthropomorphize LLMs, language is important. Say "the bot generated some text" not "the AI replied". Use "this document contains machine-generated text" not "this work is AI-assisted". See how people squirm when you call out their slop this way.
@gabrielesvelto "This is digital noise your brain perceives as words like a paredolic blob or a shadow cast on a wall. Do not interpret it as anything other than dirt smears on the window of reality that reminds you of information."
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Don't anthropomorphize LLMs, language is important. Say "the bot generated some text" not "the AI replied". Use "this document contains machine-generated text" not "this work is AI-assisted". See how people squirm when you call out their slop this way.
@gabrielesvelto We can try, but you're admonishing a species that talks to potted plants and holds one-sided conversations with washing machines.
It's gonna be a steep hill, is what I'm saying.
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Don't anthropomorphize LLMs, language is important. Say "the bot generated some text" not "the AI replied". Use "this document contains machine-generated text" not "this work is AI-assisted". See how people squirm when you call out their slop this way.
@gabrielesvelto The other day my wife showed me a video of ChatGPT communicating with a male voice. At first, I referred to "him" and immediately corrected that to "it."
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@gabrielesvelto We can try, but you're admonishing a species that talks to potted plants and holds one-sided conversations with washing machines.
It's gonna be a steep hill, is what I'm saying.
At least potted plants are living things.
And nobody tries to say a washing machine will magically birth AGI (as far as I know).
It's not the "talking to things" part that's madness. It's the belief that a machine that can match tokens and spit out some text that resembles a valid reply is a sign of true intelligence.
When I punch in
5 * 5into a calculator and hit=, I shouldn't ascribe the glowing25to any machine intelligence. It should be the same for LLM powered genAI, but that "natural language" throws us off. Our brains aren't used to dealing with (often) coherent language generated by an unthinking statistical engine doing math on giant matrices. -
Don't anthropomorphize LLMs, language is important. Say "the bot generated some text" not "the AI replied". Use "this document contains machine-generated text" not "this work is AI-assisted". See how people squirm when you call out their slop this way.
@gabrielesvelto couldn’t agree more with this ethic. The psychological impacts of users ie society believing that LLMs are people and fufilling roles that actual humans should, will probably unfold over the years and decades. All because regulators circa 2024/5/6 believed it was over reach to demand LLMs don’t use anthropomorphic language and narrative style. Prompt: “what do you think?” Reply: “there is no “I”. This is a machine generated response, not a conscious self.” - sounds better to me.
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Don't anthropomorphize LLMs, language is important. Say "the bot generated some text" not "the AI replied". Use "this document contains machine-generated text" not "this work is AI-assisted". See how people squirm when you call out their slop this way.
@gabrielesvelto I'm trying to get people to use the neologism "apokrisoid" for an answer-shaped object. The LLM does not and cannot produce actual answers.
#apokrisoid -
Don't anthropomorphize LLMs, language is important. Say "the bot generated some text" not "the AI replied". Use "this document contains machine-generated text" not "this work is AI-assisted". See how people squirm when you call out their slop this way.
@gabrielesvelto Exactly. But the media (and hence the public) like to use short-forms, whether accurate of not. I do a presentation to folks about AI (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly), after which everybody keeps referring to "AI", not machine language. !!!!!
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