> I wish they’d stop with the anthropomorphizations

You mean in how Claude interacts with you, right? If so, you can change the system prompt (under "styles") and explain what you want and don't want.

> Claude doesn’t “think” anything

Right. LLMs don't 'think' like people do, but they are doing something. At the very least, it can be called information processing.* Unless one believes in souls, that's a fair description of what humans are doing too. Humans just do it better at present.

Here's how I view the tendency of AI papers to use anthropomorphic language: it is primarily a convenience and shouldn't be taken to correspond to some particular human way of doing something. So when a paper says "LLMs can deceive" that means "LLMs output text in a way that is consistent with the text that a human would use to deceive". The former is easier to say than the latter.

Here is another problem some people have with the sentence "LLMs can deceive"... does the sentence convey intention? This gets complicated and messy quickly. One way of figuring out the answer is to ask: Did the LLM just make a mistake? Or did it 'construct' the mistake as part of some larger goal? This way of talking doesn't have to make a person crazy -- there are ways of translating it into criteria that can be tested experimentally without speculation about consciousness (qualia).

* Yes, an LLM's information processing can be described mathematically. The same could be said of a human brain if we had a sufficiently accurate enough scan. There might be some statistical uncertainty, but let's say for the sake of argument this uncertainty was low, like 0.1%. In this case, should one attribute human thinking to the mathematics we do understand? I think so. Should one attribute human thinking to the tiny fraction of the physics we can't model deterministically? Probably not, seems to me. A few unexpected neural spikes here and there could introduce local non-determinism, sure... but it seems very unlikely they would be qualitatively able to bring about thought if it was not already present.

Claude Memory