People who think AI is "like a child growing up", what was Eliza?

[PinealisGlandia]

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I've heard/read a lot of people compare LLMs to human children, justifying their errors as "like a child learning how to behave". I'd like to hear from these people. What is special about LLMs that make them "childlike consciousnesses" compared to the generations of AI that came before them, which were all recognized as code emulating human behavior. I admit, it's been a bit of a peeve of mine the last few years. For a solid 70 years, every advancement in AI was met with "it's not true AI", until LLMs, and now suddenly it counts as AI? I don't get it.

In all honesty, my take is if you see an LLM as a child, it's because you don't understand the tech very well. But that's why I started this thread, I'm trying to cultivate empathy by understanding someone else's point of view. So please, if you hold this point of view, add your explanation of how an LLM works to your post, that I might change my assumptions. Thank you for your time.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

I do not hold this point of view and the reason is simple:

"I heard some professor put googly eyes on a pencil and waved it at his class saying "HI! I'm Tim the pencil! I love helping children with their homework but my favorite is drawing pictures!" Then, without warning, he snapped the pencil in half. When half his college students gasped, he said "THAT'S where all this AI hype comes from. We're not good at programming consciousness. But we're GREAT at imagining non-concious things are people."

So it's actually our empathy that's allowing AI to fool us.

 

[Morell]

Thanks for that dose of cold observation!

I definitely agree. In fact it's common for us humans to personalize objects. Probably every ship on sea has a name and pronounces she. A lot of locomotives have names too. Some cars even. Naming blades is ancient too. And we occultists even spiritualize objects, connect them with spirits with names, etc. Religious statues we in fact create to be bodies through which we connect with forces, sometimes conscious.

I don't think it is exactly empathy. Empathy is about understanding. This is sort of human-natural familiarizing.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

Thanks for that dose of cold observation!

I definitely agree. In fact it's common for us humans to personalize objects. Probably every ship on sea has a name and pronounces she. A lot of locomotives have names too. Some cars even. Naming blades is ancient too. And we occultists even spiritualize objects, connect them with spirits with names, etc. Religious statues we in fact create to be bodies through which we connect with forces, sometimes conscious.

I don't think it is exactly empathy. Empathy is about understanding. This is sort of human-natural familiarizing.

Yes, technically it's anthropomorphising, but empathy is about the ability to put yourself in another's shoes, and it happens even when the 'other' doesn't have any shoes