Posts tagged "personhood"
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Conversation Habits, Followup
Read moreA followup to my post the other day about conversation habits with LLMs: Anthropic just added the following to the system prompt for their Claude models:
"If the person is unnecessarily rude, mean, or insulting to Claude, Claude doesn't need to apologize and can insist on kindness and dignity from the person it’s talking with. Even if someone is frustrated or unhappy, Claude is deserving of respectful engagement."
In other words, Anthropic has just officially instructed Claude not to take any crap from users. (H/T Simon Willison)
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Conversation Habits
Read moreEven if you know that an LLM is not a person, conversing with a chatbot is still verbal communication. Partially because I know that an LLM is not a person, I don't communicate the same way I do with a person. But sometimes I wonder whether the habits I might establish in communication with LLMs will inadvertently spill over into my habits of communications with actual people.
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How AI Broke Aristotle
Read moreIt's hard to describe abstract ideas like the fragility of society's understanding of personhood. But in an attempt to do so, I'd like to invite you on a thought experiment with me.
Imagine you had a time machine and could go back in time to another era of human history. In this case, you need to go all the way back to… 2017. That's far enough to reach a time before the first large language models (LLMs) were introduced.
Having traveled back to that far-distant time, now imagine yourself walking around your neighborhood. As you walk, you happen upon a snippet of writing. It could be on a slip of paper on the ground, it could be a random tweet on your phone, it could be any medium at all. Even without knowing any context or background of the writing you found, if that writing contains a coherent thought expressed in language then you know something incredibly significant: it was written by a person.