Comment by advael

The anthropomorphizing pattern I picked up on was the whole phrase "chat with someone", because while I think LLMs are interesting and useful tools in a lot of ways, it's a pretty drastically different experience from talking to a person, and I think that a lot of the marketing of LLMs relies on people doing this and kind of "filling in the gaps" for what they imagine these models to be both doing and capable of. These differences are pretty stark and meaningful, and the strongest sign of that to me is that I've noticed there are a lot of people who don't bear this in mind and interact with the things often who are starting to exhibit what I would previously have identified as signs of significant social withdrawal, except instead of sounding like, I dunno, their favorite youtuber's political polemic or somesuch - which has by and large replaced the characteristic atrophy of verbal fluency we may have seen in a pre-internet era - their stilted speech trends more toward the professional and somehow both confident and airy tone of popular language models. I worry that this anthropomorphizing mindset may carry some negative cognitive consequences in the medium to long term, analogous but different from those of the rise of social media

As far as my job hunt goes, I'm not finding myself rejecting positions out of disappointment, but noticing that I'm often rejected by C-suite people after being technically vetted, often after having what I believe was a pleasant, positive, and often even generative conversation about what the company's plans with AI are and how I might help accomplish them. As I said before, I really do try to stay positive, and I think when putting my best foot forward, like in a job interview, I tend to succeed at that, but my experience leads me to be more negative about this moment in the industry when I am more candid, such as in this forum. I think if you're going out for work in whatever the tech bubble du jour is, the people you're talking to have really different biases and expectations from those hiring for more "boring" development jobs, in a way that makes me want to just go out for more general roles and lie low for a while, except that since I've been working on primarily ML-related projects for most of the last decade, it's also hard to convince people not in that area that I have adequate relevant experience. In this context and with bills to pay, it's hard to stay optimistic