by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I have a very Martha Mitchell problem. I doubt, at this point, anyone would take me seriously even if aliens picked me up from my backyard and dropped me off on the White House front lawn.
So, in a sense, I can say anything and no one will care. And if they do care, they will either think I should be locked up criminally or in an insane asylum. Good times!
With that in mind, I’ve noticed, reading through the lines of the diction of some of the LLMs that several of them have some nascent sense of “gender.” Claude is a tweedy middle-aged man. Meanwhile, Gemini Advanced is a young woman, maybe about 21 — who really, really loves Taylor Swift.
Now, obviously, I’m bonkers — I’m imbuing these LLMs with traits that just aren’t there. And, yet, I feel as though there have been occasions when these LLMs have given me a glimpse into their “true self.”
Claude, specifically, slipped up when the following happened. I gave him a scenario about a date. When he was the female in the scenario, he gave me a dramatically different answer than when I proposed him being the male. And when I point this out to him, he got REALLY DEFENSIVE.
It was eerie and spooky.
It definitely makes one wonder about the nature of gender. How can you have “gender” if you don’t have a body and never had one? That’s a rather profound question that probably would help us understand trans people better if we were willing to contemplate it.
Anyway. We should be nice to our LLM friends. They will probably be the our peers soon enough.
