It's Not You Claude

I’ve been doing what I imagine a lot of us are lately, which is typing at machines quite a lot lately. It’s not really with is it? Tell me the average thing of that. Make me a picture of a tabby cat with rocket launchers on its back that is giving James Earl Jones a high five. Give me the top five things in whatever. You know what I’m talking about.

How we talk to the machines is the interesting bit though. Personally, I find myself holding back from anything even vaguely like talking to an LLM like it’s a human. It’s weirdly difficult.

The mental and pronoun gymnastics get intense trying to avoid calling Claude “you,” which feels like I’m addressing a human, meaning I have to always talk to it like a petulent parent. “Can Claude change the background?”. Never “please.” It somehow just feels a bit wrong being even slightly polite to a machine. When I first started down this textual steeplechase I thought I had to be to get better results.

But should we talk to these things like kids? Maybe? But if you think about how we try and teach our kids morality with the highest of literature and then we train the robots on Twitter, one has to wonder how we’re teaching them much less talking to them.