NB: The following post will be entirely human-generated, with no LLM involvement – except for the cover image rendered by Gemini. It will also be brief.

I am (still, perpetually) learning French, and I use Anki to help me. I recommend it for standard and non-standard flashcard uses. Recently, I asked ChatGPT to generate a CSV with phrases for the front and back of the cards, for example:

Front: I will be able to visit France next year.

Back: Je pourrai visiter la France l’année prochaine. (futur simple)

I found the pack useful, but a few days later (today), I asked for more than first-person perspectives, as well as additional tenses. I entered this prompt, which is what triggered this blog entry:

‘You’ rendered this for me. Might you generate a similar file that I can use to import to Anki that includes versions other than first-person singular? Future tenses would be helpful as well.

Notice the ‘you‘ in scare quotes – inverted commas.

It’s no secret that I am partial to the episodic selves of Galen Strawson in contrast with diachronic selves, which is to say that I don;t believe that the you or the I or yesterday – or even a second ago – is intrinsically the same person. I’ve explained this elsewhere, so I’ll leave it here.

As much as I feel this way, I don’t feel put off referring to myself as myself or I – me, myself, and I – or to you as you, but I am more consciously uncomfortable with addressing an LLM as you, as demonstrated.

I know full well that each prompt and response is to a different instance of the LLM – a different episode. Unless the LLM accesses an earlier conversation in memory – and I use this term loosely here, too – it would not retain context, and the absence of you-ness would be painfully obvious.

I don;t believe that the self of people is functionally any different. Obviously, humans are carbon-based rather than silicon-based, and storage and retrieval operate differently beyond the substrates, but the mechanism is metaphorically similar.

Does anyone else feel dis-ease in addressing an LLM in the second person? Or is it just me – or me?