Language Models as Thespians

Compared to other analogies, thinking of LLMs as actors offers substantial predictive power.5 The analogy explains hallucination by way of actors perpetuating tropes and improvising details while in character, and it offers enough intuition to predict which tasks LLMs will succeed and fail at, even for someone who does not understand how language models work. More importantly, it immediately, tangibly benefits users by implying the technique of prompting LLMs to adopt a persona. Besides the aptitude of the comparison itself, it is also familiar—everyone knows about actors.