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I agree and it always makes me think of how people interact with the ship’s computer in Star Trek. It never uses first person pronouns. Instead of “I can’t do that,” it says “unable to comply.” Instead of “I don’t know,” it says simply “unknown.”

The ship’s computer in Star Trek is a much better comparison to LLMs than Data from TNG or the Doctor from Voyager. The makers of LLMs desperately want us to think of those characters because that’s more exciting, but their technology is closer to the non-sentient computer that’s just an interface.

In fact, seen in this light, it’s clear that the impersonal and non chatty tone of the ship computer is a better design for the task it was set up to do. How insufferable would it be if it was constantly responding to users with “That’s a great question. I can help you with that.”

The tone of LLMs only makes sense when you consider that they are intentionally set up to fool you into thinking there is a mind there. (And i guess also when you consider that they are designed to spend as many tokens as possible.)

"They're designed to spend as few tokens as possible" like social media is designed for you to use it as rarely and shortly as possible. (Like maybe they're being optimised to provide responses to prompts on the shorter side of "tokens", but overall, maxing engagement is what they're going for).

those are two entirely separate things

Yes, but the two things mentioned here - getting people to think its a person-like entity responding & maximising engagement, ie "token spend" - are entirely linked. (addmittedly OP may have meant the latter a little differently - the overall point stands though). bsky.app/profile/yanb...

I'm talking about the fact that when you ask a simple question to ChatGPTit generates 6 paragraphs of text when it could have answered in one or two sentences. If these programs are being designed to be as economical as possible, they are failing miserably.