Anthropomorphism in Children's Interactions with LLM Chatbots

SStatsAreFun about 4 hours ago 18 commentsRead Article on arxiv.org

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Discussion (18 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

lz400•9 minutes ago

When my daughter was 7yo and she talked to chatgpt, she repeatedly asked, what's your name? are you a boy or a girl? eventually she lost interest at the evasiveness of the answers, like she marked it as not fun to interact with, not a real person. It's different now, that she understands it can help with homework :D

mncharity•41 minutes ago

Similar issues arose with automated learning companions for XR. Mismatches between a learner's mental model of the companion, and its actual capabilities and limitations, can cause so many problematic misunderstandings. So one idea, is to emphasize non-human non-social sources of behavior - to set up alternative narratives for "why did it do that?". The companion might be "Sparky, the glitching robot dog". So forgetting things, getting them wrong, spacing out, being unhelpful, confused, distracted, missing social cues, giving poor cues, etc... that's just glitchy robot dog glitching, not social signal. Maybe - speculative.

tolugenius•about 1 hour ago

I'm curious what specific chatbots they used, a companion chatbot is quite different than say chatgpt. And I imagine the former is what children will anthropomorphize, my understand is chatgpt/gemini/the standard is more "do my homework" services. I am curious if the same mechanisms they found with children are the same or at least on the same thread line with the adults who found companions or attachment with certain models (like the gpt 4o saga).

wpenman•about 1 hour ago

In section 4.2 they have a figure with the models that each of the studies used that they analyzed. Overwhelmingly (28/36) it was a GPT model. Top 4 use cases for the apps were self-directed information seeking, co-authoring stories with AI, teaching science through dialogue, and eliciting children's emotional expression.

mmooss•about 2 hours ago

Why allow anthropomorphism in LLM or any computer output, for any age group?

A simple regulation would be that all LLM output must:

  * Explicitly identify itself as a computer

  * Identify the human or human org controlling it
    (e.g., 'This is Claude v8.90 software made by Anthropic.')

  * Not attempt to mimic humans except for entertainment
    purposes, and then clearly labeled (e.g., 'This is not
    a human. It is a computer pretending to be human for
    entertainment purposes.').

What violation of those regulations would be for other than defrauding and/or manipulationg people? They are easily complied with and I don't see those regulations impacting the economic productivity gains projected for LLM use.

marcus_holmes•about 1 hour ago

Isn't this about children attributing human characteristics onto the LLM, rather than the LLM itself pretending to be human?

And we do this with lots of things that are not human for children (e.g. Bluey and Peppa Pig). Do we need a "this is not a human" warning for them, too?

estearum•43 minutes ago

Do Bluey and Peppa Pig produce convincing human-like responses to virtually any human-generated input directed towards them?

If so, then uhh yeah we should definitely regulate that shit

dpark•about 1 hour ago

This sounds like the kind of well-intentioned thinking that results in products that are no safer practically but are far more unpleasant to interact with. This is like the pop up every time I start my car that reminds me I should not play with the screen while I’m driving.

ndnichols•about 2 hours ago

Preach! Mustafa Suleyman had a great post on some of this last year: https://mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-conscious-ai-is-coming

4b11b4•about 1 hour ago

Seriously: for the sake of all future children, the elderly, and everyone in between

pixl97•about 2 hours ago

Because it makes the product mostly useless for all kinds of things?

windexh8er•about 2 hours ago

Care to enlighten us? Because you seem to imply you want to have a conversation about your day every time you fire up a shell.

4b11b4•about 1 hour ago

What world are you living in, I don't want to go there

mmooss•about 2 hours ago

What things? Again, I don't see any but manipulation and fraud, but I certainly could be missing some.

all2•about 1 hour ago

Role play, which is a huge consumer of tokens. You can glance at openrouter's usage stats and see what apps tokens are going to and what the inference content was classified as. It's quite revealing.

ericol•about 1 hour ago

I don't need a computer to mimic a human. AT ALL

As a matter of fact, for the line of work I do (programming, devops, the works) being conscious about the fact that I am just getting an algorithm outputting text that is probabilistically related to the input I gave it would actually be healthy for me and my mental state.

I HATE having to say "you" when working with an LLM.

marcus_holmes•about 1 hour ago

I have the same urge - third-person the LLM is an it, for sure, but I'm not aware of a suitable second-person construction for talking to things. Maybe we need to invent one.