I’m not sure about whether a dispositional/gut level impulse towards seeing AIs as people is necessary for satisfying the social drive. When I reflect on my own experiences, I think I see LLMs as more than simply stochastic parrots, but somehow even if they were just that, I feel like the niche they fill in satisfying my social drives is also determined by what kind of interactions I get to have with them.
For instance, I think part of what satisfies me a lot about getting to talk with Claude about my short stories is partly how long I can talk with Claude for (god help the usage limits). Like with a human, even when I show my friends some work and they are sweet enough to take time out of their day to read it, it’s still not socially appropriate to demand that they have an hour long conversation with me about what I wrote. Whether they can nerd out with me about a story, and how long they are able to do it, is constrained by how busy they are, but also how much they are willing to engage with the story (beyond just reading it).
But with LLMs it’s kind of like I don’t have to feel guilty over 2 hour long conversations talking about metaphors, similes, and hidden references to other works of literature. So even though I’ve had real people read my work and give really useful and enjoyable feedback, somehow the thing that makes LLMs so joyful here is that I don’t have to worry about making someone feel pressured to feign interest, but also that even when my friends have been interested enough to discuss my stories, sometimes you just want more.
Although I’ll note cautiously here that while I’ve been framing this positively, Duvenaud et al.‘s work on Gradual Disempowerment would warn that this is precisely the danger of AI. If it can be your ‘friend’, it can almost always be a better friend (than most), if it can be your husband, it can easily be a better husband. But you are right, in both these cases, it still depends greatly on the person since any relative improvement only matters if you are willing to marry an AI in the first place.
I’m not sure about whether a dispositional/gut level impulse towards seeing AIs as people is necessary for satisfying the social drive. When I reflect on my own experiences, I think I see LLMs as more than simply stochastic parrots, but somehow even if they were just that, I feel like the niche they fill in satisfying my social drives is also determined by what kind of interactions I get to have with them.
For instance, I think part of what satisfies me a lot about getting to talk with Claude about my short stories is partly how long I can talk with Claude for (god help the usage limits). Like with a human, even when I show my friends some work and they are sweet enough to take time out of their day to read it, it’s still not socially appropriate to demand that they have an hour long conversation with me about what I wrote. Whether they can nerd out with me about a story, and how long they are able to do it, is constrained by how busy they are, but also how much they are willing to engage with the story (beyond just reading it).
But with LLMs it’s kind of like I don’t have to feel guilty over 2 hour long conversations talking about metaphors, similes, and hidden references to other works of literature. So even though I’ve had real people read my work and give really useful and enjoyable feedback, somehow the thing that makes LLMs so joyful here is that I don’t have to worry about making someone feel pressured to feign interest, but also that even when my friends have been interested enough to discuss my stories, sometimes you just want more.
Although I’ll note cautiously here that while I’ve been framing this positively, Duvenaud et al.‘s work on Gradual Disempowerment would warn that this is precisely the danger of AI. If it can be your ‘friend’, it can almost always be a better friend (than most), if it can be your husband, it can easily be a better husband. But you are right, in both these cases, it still depends greatly on the person since any relative improvement only matters if you are willing to marry an AI in the first place.