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Humans easily anthropomorphize things that are not humans, ascribing human attributes like motive and comprehension and emotion to objects and processes that are not people who can have those attributes.

Claude is not a human.

It is overwhelmingly easier to anthropomorphize Claude or Siri or an LLM that communicates with you more eloquently than your boss than it is to anthropomorphize a cranky, tired starter motor. It's often easier to do than it is not to do, and sometimes, it's a useful abstraction. But it's not precise or correct, and can result in errors.

It could also just be that they're getting confused when using tools configured without a username dedicated to the tool. It's easy to end up with a comment or commit message that says "I prefer X over Y" posted on Alxndr's account and have coworkers confused whether that's the LLM or the human making that statement.

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A cranking starter motor is doing its job. :)
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IIRC I experienced this confusion the most when reading commit messages and documentation authored by Claude in my repos. Now that I've managed to convince it to stop using first-person pronouns, I haven't gotten tripped up by its prose.

I think a second-order effect is that my installation of Claude writes with a less-personal perspective, which I'm also finding a little easier to understand.

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This is a method of manipulating the LLM, it doesn't have to be true.

I've given LLMs religion before to manipulate their behavior, that doesn't mean I believed in the great spaghetti goddess.

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This comment leaves me even more confused.
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An LLM is just a machine, you can manipulate it with words.

> It can be tricky for humans to interpret the meaning when Generative AI uses first-person pronouns (e.g. "I", "me", "my", "myself")

These words are for the LLM. The user wants the LLM to not use personal pronouns so the user is claiming that they're confusing. It does not matter one tiny bit whether or not that claim is true, the claim is being used to get obedience from the LLM. It is more effective to give reasons than to just give commands. But if it were more effective to quote Moby Dick and that got better results, a user would do that.

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Calling it "obedience" still seems to me like anthropomorphizing. It's really difficult to avoid, hmm?
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who cares? I'm not anthropomorphizing, they're just words, they're all made up.

As I've said before, I'm not inventing a large volume of parallel vocabulary that means for each word "this, but instead with an LLM".

Language is FULL of words that mean congruent things in vastly different contexts. We should all be smart enough to understand metaphor.

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