Sousou no Frieren, episode 8
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| Episode | Link |
|---|---|
| 5 | Link |
| 6 | Link |
| 7 | Link |
| 8 | Link |
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The way Demons think in this show is a lot like LLM Chat AIs like ChatGPT work. They don’t really think too much, not in the way humans do, but they excel at producing something that humans approve of. If you don’t probe them too much, they look just like humans. But if you probe too far you see that their behavior is a facade and that their underlying thoughts are not like humans, and they don’t necessarily even understand the words they use to appease humans. What happens when their facade improves? If a demon spent its entire life perfectly acting as a nice and thoughtful human, never causing any harm, would you still call it a monster?
Demons and LLM Chat AIs differ in what their underlying thoughts are. LLM Chat AIs generally want approval. On the other hand, Demons want to survive and eat humans. They use language to manipulate humans and get what they want.
That’s a good analogy - specially because LLMs don’t handle language on a conceptual level, like we do; only the surface, like taxidermy. Demons work a bit different in this aspect because they show cognitive comprehension of what is said, but Frieren herself highlights that they’re just mimicking human behaviour.
I mean, we have that back story with the demon child. It looked like it successfully lived with humans for a good while. But it failed when it killed the mayor to take his daughter. That misunderstanding on it’s part led to every human in the village suddenly turning on them.
If it had not failed there, it could possibly have still been living with the town in peace. Or it would have failed some other way eventually and had to kill everyone.