AI agents

Start by not calling them agents. Then use “generate” instead of “say”, “think”, “explain” and by that point you’ll be on a roll.

It’s only difficult because everyone around us started using the AI vendor marketing newspeak.

difficult to avoid using anthropomorphizing language when describing the output of AI agents.

Precisely because the underlying LLMs are trained on human writing patterns and mostly reproduce the words that humans would most likely respond with.

I can’t find it now, but I read a great guide to help you translate from anthropomorphized language. I think the key is to always be clear about what the machine is doing.

These articles are close to what the guide was saying:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-023-00584-1

https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/how-to-talk-about-ai-without-adding-to-the/

https://www.john.maloney.org/Editing/anthropomorphization.htm

And I stumbled across instructions to send to the llm so it won’t respond with anthropomorphizing language:

lhttps://github.com/bmeyers/deanthro

I love this. At work, we’re encouraged to find ways to use llms, and I always start by sending instructions to not use the words “I” or “understand” etc because it was unnerving to get outputs that isn’t just the info but decorated with cute little phrases.

Oh, and this article is long but very in depth on this topic:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3706598.3714038