One of the most off-putting things to me about #AI #LLM-based tools is that they encourage you to treat these models like people. You talk to it like it’s sentient, and you assume it has a theory of mind, and you give it tasks like you would another person. If it doesn’t work, you have a “conversation” with it as if you’re trying to explain something to another human being, then encourage it to try again.

That sort of interaction necessarily engages your “human interaction” set of skills in your brain, and it is really easy to fall into the trap of believing that an LLM *is* another human being. To me, this illusion creates a moral hazard, encouraging the user to imbue the statistical autocomplete machine with human characteristics that it doesn’t deserve, and explaining its (mis)behavior in human terms. Do this often enough, and the user will start thinking about the model in terms of human interaction, which is a category error with serious implications.

Not only is this kind of error bad for your mental health, it also blinds you to vulnerabilities due to the inaccuracy of your mental model. These are statistical word-selecting machines. The illusion of their sentience or humanity resides entirely in your head, because they use human-like phrases that trick you into seeing life where there isn’t. By treating them as something they are not, you are opening yourself to attack vectors, category errors, and unmet expectations that you don’t even realize were possible.
@drahardja the unsettling thing is that making the other choice of interaction modes ALSO has a serious hazard: it trains your subconscious that there's a class of things that talk like humans but should be dehumanized.
@Catfish_Man Right. So the end result of extensive LLM use is either psychosis or sociopathy, unless you are constantly on guard against falling into either camp.
@drahardja @Catfish_Man I have always been a psychotic sociopath, so this sounds like a you problem.