Who is LLM?

It's become a common habit for developers to give Large Language Models (LLMs) a persona when working with them. The first time I ran into this was my colleague Birgitta characterizing her LLM as a stubborn donkey (called “Dusty”). She picked it because it had the traits of:

• eager to help
• stubborn
• very well-read, but inexperienced (for Dungeons and Dragons fans: high intelligence, low wisdom)
• won’t admit when it doesn’t “know” something

-- Birgitta Böckeler

I also like Kent Beck's notion of using the persona of a Genie. When you rub a lamp, the genie does what you tell it to do. But perhaps not quite in the way you would have wished. The persona perfectly captures the mix of great power, eagerness to help, and an almost pathological ability to undermine whatever help it's supposedly trying to give you.

The genie seems to assume that its planetary-sized brain is capable of handling any amount of complexity, so it needn’t ever reduce complexity. It’s right until it isn’t.

-- Kent Beck

Kent also suggested another great persona in an off-hand comment liking the experience of invoking it to using a slot machine. Sometimes you get a fantastic result, often you get dreck, and the distribution between the two seems random. It's almost as if the LLM is using the same addictive algorithms designed by casinos to keep folks playing the slots. Or indeed the behavior of an abusive partner.

As I listen to those who use LLMs a lot, a common story is that we have to invest significant effort to learn how to use them well. Hitting the jackpot makes them seem like they are easy to use, but that's a mirage, which can skew our expectations of the technology, leading to frustration.

A persona that's been increasingly suggesting itself to me recently is that of Uriah Heep - a character in Charles Dickens's novel “David Copperfield”1 Heep is infuriatingly obsequious, constantly stressing how “umble” he is and how he serves only to do his betters' bidding.

‘Oh, thank you, Master Copperfield,’ said Uriah Heep, ‘for that remark! It is so true! Umble as I am, I know it is so true! Oh, thank you, Master Copperfield!’

But he is full of malice: manipulating, and essentially controlling those people he “serves”.

‘Uriah,’ she replied, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘has made himself indispensable to papa. He is subtle and watchful. He has mastered papa’s weaknesses, fostered them, and taken advantage of them, until--to say all that I mean in a word, Trotwood,--until papa is afraid of him.’

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