Trevor Blackwell Links LLM Anthropomorphism to Subjective Training Data

Trevor Blackwell, the roboticist who founded Anybots and co-founded Y Combinator, posted that people anthropomorphize agents because they anthropomorphize themselves. He sees the pattern in chains of thought and model responses. Blackwell attributes it to first-person subjective material in training data. He suggests asking an LLM what its favorite car is as a simple test. The observation appears in his public post and stands as his stated view.