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If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II (arxiv.org)
5 points by gekoxyz 119 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A simple neural network trained on Age of Empires II shows human-like traits can appear in any powerful system, not just language models. Without measurement rules, judging whether such traits exist gives circular or empty answers, so experiments should assume they are not unique.

Abstract

Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain invariant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion on these attributes requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions. This is regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject, or whether the outcome shows existence or non-existence. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.

Adrian de Wynter
arXiv:2605.31514 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY · submitted May 29, 2026 · updated Jun 11, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Fixed corollary 1, added stat sig

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