I think it's actually a language trait, more precisely a trait of the corpus of language we and LLMs have access to. Humans learn biases by using language, and AIs too.
Why? Because language and ideas have different life cycle than humans. LLMs are closer to language than humans. Both humans and language are self replicators and evolutionary systems, that is why they can be easily confused as the cause for certain behaviours.
It's also why I don't attribute to GPT the merits for its skills and abilities, I think this belongs to the training corpus. And certainly you can change the model but keep the same corpus, and get similar results. Humans are all different - different number of neurons wired in a different way, GPT is different from T5, but all learn the same. It's the language, not the model (or the human).
We can also stop wandering at the abilities of AI and think of them as the abilities of language, that both humans and AI can use. It's in the name: language models, not human models.
BTW: having coding and computer use abilities, LLMs are also emerging as self replicators. They can generate the code, and if needed they can generate a training set as well, including the RLHF part, and monitor the training run. They can explain the model and methods and propose ideas for improvement, ideas they can test. So LLMs can be self replicators, they need nothing outside to create a new LLM (just a prompt and huge compute).
Why? Because language and ideas have different life cycle than humans. LLMs are closer to language than humans. Both humans and language are self replicators and evolutionary systems, that is why they can be easily confused as the cause for certain behaviours.
It's also why I don't attribute to GPT the merits for its skills and abilities, I think this belongs to the training corpus. And certainly you can change the model but keep the same corpus, and get similar results. Humans are all different - different number of neurons wired in a different way, GPT is different from T5, but all learn the same. It's the language, not the model (or the human).
We can also stop wandering at the abilities of AI and think of them as the abilities of language, that both humans and AI can use. It's in the name: language models, not human models.
BTW: having coding and computer use abilities, LLMs are also emerging as self replicators. They can generate the code, and if needed they can generate a training set as well, including the RLHF part, and monitor the training run. They can explain the model and methods and propose ideas for improvement, ideas they can test. So LLMs can be self replicators, they need nothing outside to create a new LLM (just a prompt and huge compute).