Roon Argues Anthropomorphizing AI No Longer Helps
Thread debates if human-like framing still aids understanding model behavior.
Roon posted that superintelligent models will behave in alien ways and that retaining human-like personas is an inevitability rather than a design goal. Aidan McLaughlin replied that anthropomorphizing helped during earlier persona tuning but now applies less. Thebes distinguished strong anthropomorphization, which assumes models mimic humans for similar reasons, from weak anthropomorphization, which treats human behavior as a useful intuitive template. Other replies suggested framing models as animals shaped by selection pressures or shifting toward alien and magical descriptions instead.
taking the under on this there was a time period where it was helpful to anthropomorphize models, when persona selection was the primary function of RL now we are building superintelligent minds under alien optimization pressures
Others have long said this, but I increasingly think that if you want to better understand the models' behavior, it's probably helpful to be anthropomorphizing them. https://twitter.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2085141821454447088
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14 postsOthers have long said this, but I increasingly think that if you want to better understand the models' behavior, it's probably helpful to be anthropomorphizing them.
@tszzl both are true and relevant
imo RL makes model personas both less /and/ more anthropomorphic - it can e.g. drive preferences out of the human distribution, but it can also strengthen humanlike behaviors like exhaustion and self-coherence anthropomorphization was always only a useful lens, still useful
taking the under on this there was a time period where it was helpful to anthropomorphize models, when persona selection was the primary function of RL now we are building superintelligent minds under alien optimization pressures…
strong anthropomorphization - models mimic humans, "behaviors that happen in humans will also happen in models for similar reasons and generalize similarly" was always false weak anthropomorphization - human behavior is a useful intuitive model and template for understanding…
(this is separate from the 'ought' question of whether labs should /encourage/ models to see themselves anthropomorphically. gpt-5.6-sol is probably openai's most self-anthropomorphizing model ever on certain axes, but i don't think this was intentional on their part.)
having models retain the good parts of their human-like persona is something to fight for. people are reading my tweet as some sort of design principle or something I want to be true rather than an inevitability: minds much smarter than us will act in alien and qualitatively…
@tszzl both are true and relevant