If I put my car in neutral and push it down a hill, I’m responsible for whatever happens.
> How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?
Answer according to your definitions: false premise, the author (the person who set up the LLM loops) was not grateful enough to want to send such a letter.
I understand the guilt he feels, but this is really more like making a meme in 2005 (before we even called it "memes") and suddenly it's soke sort of naxi dogwhistle in 2025. You didn't even create the original picture, you just remixed it in a way people would catch onto later. And you sure didn't turn it into a dogwhistle.
What a moronic waste of resources. Random act of kindness? How low is the bar that you consider a random email as an act of kindness? Stupid shit. They at least could instruct the agents to work in a useful task like those parroted by Altman et al, eg find a cure for cancer, solving poverty, solving fusion.
Also, llms don't and can't "want" anything. They also don't "know" anything so they can't understand what "kindness" is.
Why do people still think software have any agency at all?
Criticizing anthropomorphic language is lazy, unconsidered, and juvenile. You can't string together a legitimate complaint so you're just picking at the top level 'easy' feature to sound important and informed.
Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want. You have not made a grand discovery that recontextualuzes all of human experience. You're pointing at a conversation everyone else has had a million times and feeling important about it.
We use this kind of language as a shorthand because talking about inherent motivations and activation parameters is incredibly clunky and obnoxious in everyday conversation.
The question isn't why people think software has agency (they don't) but why you think everyone else is so much dumber than you that they believe software is actually alive. You should reflect on that question.
No, they don't.
There's a whole cadre of people who talk about AGI and self awareness in LLMs who use anthropomorphic language to raise money.
> We use this kind of language as a shorthand because ...
You, not we. You're using the language of snake oil salesman because they've made it commonplace.
When the goal of the project is an anthropomorphic computer, anthropomorphizing language is really, really confusing.
Please go ahead now and EAT YOUR WORDS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352875
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/12/22/a-year-of-vibes/
> Because LLMs now not only help me program, I’m starting to rethink my relationship to those machines. I increasingly find it harder not to create parasocial bonds with some of the tools I use. [...] I have tried to train myself for two years, to think of these models as mere token tumblers, but that reductive view does not work for me any longer.
To the contrary, it's one of the most important criticisms against AI (and its masters). The same criticism applies to a broader set of topics, too, of course; for example, evolution.
What you are missing is that the human experience is determined by meaning. Anthropomorphic language about, and by, AI, attacks the core belief that human language use is attached to meaning, one way or another.
> Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want.
What you are missing is that this stuff works way more deeply than "knowing". Have you heard of body language, meta-language? When you open ChatGPT, the fine print at the bottom says, "AI chatbot", but the large print at the top says, "How can I help?", "Where should we begin?", "What’s on your mind today?"
Can't you see what a fucking LIE this is?
> We use this kind of language as a shorthand because talking about inherent motivations and activation parameters is incredibly clunky
Not at all. What you call "clunky" in fact exposes crucially important details; details that make the whole difference between a human, and a machine that talks like a human.
People who use that kind of language are either sloppy, or genuinely dishonest, or underestimate the intellect of their audience.
> The question isn't why people think software has agency (they don't) but why you think everyone else is so much dumber than you that they believe software is actually alive.
Because people have committed suicide due to being enabled and encouraged by software talking like a sympathetic human?
Because people in our direct circles show unmistakeable signs that they believe -- don't "think", but believe -- that AI is alive? "I've asked ChatGPT recently what the meaning of marriage is." Actual sentence I've heard.
Because the motherfuckers behind public AI interfaces fine-tune them to be as human-like, as rewarding, as dopamine-inducing, as addictive, as possible?
Sorry, uh. Have you met the general population? Hell. Look at the leader of the "free world"
To paraphrase the late George Carlin "imagine the dumbest person you know. Now realize 50% of people are stupider than that!"
JFC this makes me want to vomit
These descriptions are, of course, also written by LLMs. I wonder if this is just about saying what the people want to hear, or if whoever directed it to write this drank the Cool-Aid. It's so painfully lacking in self-awareness. Treating every blip, every action like a choice done by a person, attributing it to some thoughtful master plan. Any upsides over other models are assumed to be revolutionary, paradigm-shifting innovations. Topped off by literally treating the LLM like a person ("they", "who", and so on). How awful.
> while maintaining perfect awareness
"awareness" my ass.
Awful.
They’ve clearly bought too much into AI hype if they thought telling the agent to “do good” would work. The result was obviously pissing the hell out of rob pike. They should stop it.
What a stupid, selfish and childish thing to do.
This technology is going to change the world, but people need to accept its limitations
Pissing off people with industrial spam "raising money for charity " is the opposite of useful, and is going to go even more horribly wrong.
LLMs make fantastic tools, but they have no agency. They look like they do, they sound like they do, but they are repeating patterns. It is us hallucinating that they have the potential tor agency
I hope the world survives this craziness!
