Love the totally conflicting statements in that post.
- When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize
- ...my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from.
So he's anthropomorphised the LLM as being like a human himself (rather than forcing it to act as a machine via its prompt for example).
Sometimes I wonder if this is a personality thing. It has never occurred to me to anthropomorphize these things. But it seems like a huge number of people struggle with this.
I suspect harness and usage modality is a big factor. Personally I disable all "memory" features wherever possible. I don't want the LLM to "get to know me", or any illusion thereof, which I assume helps with not anthropomorphizing it.
I use memory all the time so that I can ask it about things. That doesn't mean it "knows me" any more than my notes documents do, it's just more convenient to search.
Yeah I don't think we disagree that much about this. But I'm not really worried about this particular habit forming risk. I can see where you're coming from though.
But frankly, I mostly use (greenfield, non-remembering) LLMs directly to counteract the enshittification of search brought on by attempts to use AI to remember things about me (and especially to sell me things).
This works well for me because (a) I'm usually using my desktop, and (b) I'm a touch-typist. I want to say that my search results have gotten back to where they were a decade or more ago by doing this, even though I often have to give a couple of prompts in order to get the LLM to provide me a useful link.
I guess I'm also pretty skeptical of the "automatically remember things about me" functionality. But I really like being able to say "hey make sure to remember this fact" and being able to ask about those things later.
For me the convenience of “hey remember this fact” is outweighed by a desire not to get stuck in a search or context bubble.
It might be nice to have better UI to control which bits of history get added to the context of a chat, but then just use a coding harness instead of web UI
Maybe. But I don't just use it for coding. For instance one thing I use it for is helping me track and evolve my workouts over time. It helps that it can remember the weight and number of reps I did the previous time. I could make an app for this, but it works well to do it purely within chat, with memory, and that's convenient. This is just an example, I use it this way for a number of things. I'm not going to use a coding harness for this kind of trivial use case!
SillyUsername · · focus · HN ↗
- When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize
- ...my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from.
So he's anthropomorphised the LLM as being like a human himself (rather than forcing it to act as a machine via its prompt for example).
Maybe he should have had an AI check his post :D
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗
Retr0id · · focus · HN ↗
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗
zephen · · focus · HN ↗
But are you happy handing over your notes documents to mass aggregators of information?
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗
zephen · · focus · HN ↗
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗
zephen · · focus · HN ↗
But frankly, I mostly use (greenfield, non-remembering) LLMs directly to counteract the enshittification of search brought on by attempts to use AI to remember things about me (and especially to sell me things).
This works well for me because (a) I'm usually using my desktop, and (b) I'm a touch-typist. I want to say that my search results have gotten back to where they were a decade or more ago by doing this, even though I often have to give a couple of prompts in order to get the LLM to provide me a useful link.
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗
rsfern · · focus · HN ↗
It might be nice to have better UI to control which bits of history get added to the context of a chat, but then just use a coding harness instead of web UI
sanderjd · · focus · HN ↗