Anthropomorphization of AI

Halvar Flake talking about anthropomorphization of AI.

The moment that people ascribe properties such as “consciousness” or “ethics” or “values” or “morals” to these learnt mappings is where I tend to get lost. We are speaking about a big recurrence equation that produces a new word, and that stops producing words if we don’t crank the shaft.

To me, wondering if this contraption will “wake up” is similarly bewildering as if I was to ask a computational meteorologist if he isn’t afraid of his meteorological numerical calculation will “wake up”.

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Instead of saying “we cannot ensure that no harmful sequences will be generated by our function, partially because we don’t know how to specify and enumerate harmful sequences”, we talk about “behaviors”, “ethical constraints”, and “harmful actions in pursuit of their goals”. All of these are anthropocentric concepts that – in my mind – do not apply to functions or other mathematical objects. And using them muddles the discussion, and our thinking about what we’re doing when we create, analyze, deploy and monitor LLMs.