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"Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#141

Post by Retric »

pixl97 wrote: post #74
Retric wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What seems plausible depends on your level of suspect matter expertise. Hallucinations are in general ridiculously incorrect and nowhere close to anything worth testing. Put another way what percentage of molecules are worth testing as a viable treatment for epilepsy? 1 in 100 trillion, less? Do you really expect hallucinations to generally pick both plausible and untested targets here?

> Put another way what percentage of molecules are worth testing as a viable treatment for epilepsy? 1 in 100 trillion, less? Depends at the cost and rate you can test them. When simulations are fast and cheap you have far more latitude in filtering out 'ridiculously incorrect'.

If you can somehow build an actual physical test that costs 1 cent to both synthesize and validate a chemical you’re still looking at ~1 trillion dollars per candidate.

Simulations might be that cheap someday, but that’s still checking plausibility not running an actual experiment.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#142

Post by Retric »

criddell wrote: post #127
Retric wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random ideas include things like: The speed of sound suddenly doubles between 627.500847 to 627.500848 atmospheres. I’ve said it, now try and find someone willing to test it. That’s hard because Scientists want stuff that’s worth spending their limited time on earth looking into.

An AI would probably flag that idea as unlikely and not worth pursuing. I don’t think we are that far off from having AIs that can read and incorporate the concepts from every paper ever published and start generating random ideas that fit into an internal framework it develops. I think that within the lifetime of some readers here, an AI will spit out a hypothesis (like a method for producing a room temperature supe…

That suggestion is more feasible, but far from what was being proposed.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#143

Post by Barrin92 »

nomel wrote: post #131
Barrin92 wrote: post #43

it's just a consequence of the annoying anthropomorphizing of tech. "Human's can't do X, the AI model can't do X, look it's just like me fr, fr". Of course nobody applies that logic to a forklift or a debugger. If gdb started to hallucinate variables into existence we don't call it a creative act, we call it a bug. Given that these AI systems just like any other machine operate at scale, automated, and fast, they mus…

I'm trying to understand this type of perspective, which is somewhat at odds with mine, so the following questions are completely genuine: Which models have you used? What did you try with them? Have you used GPT-4? How frequently?

I use Copilot pretty frequently when I program, find it very useful to explore an API i don't know or just help write bash or other stuff I suck at or just to save me some typing. Still often produces very unidiomatic and non-performant code though. But it's worth it for what it costs.

I do have a separate GPT-4 subscription as well but I've used it less and less. Tried to use it for search and text summary but it makes too many mistakes. Invented authors, papers, wrong summaries are just too common for it to be useful. So effectively I found myself Googling every time i used it to make sure the information is correct, which made the entire thing redundant.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#144

Post by invig »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #135
happytiger wrote: post #11

The LLM AI technology generation is optimized to be fluently conversational and not to be factually correct all the time. 1) Hallucinations often appear because LLMs are designed to create fluent, coherent text. 2) LLMs have no understanding of the underlying reality that language describes. 3) LLMs use statistics to generate language that is grammatically and semantically correct within the context of the prompt. It…

In other words, LLM's are, in the technical sense defined by Harry Frankfurt, bullshitters. The essence of bullshit (as he defines it) is that it is neither truth nor lie but rather unconcerned with veracity altogether. A bullshitter wants to appear smart, or convince others to agree with them, or some other conversational objective. Bullshit statements may or may not ultimately turn out to be true, but the thing tha…

Isn’t the same thing true of any human who isn’t doing scientific research? Like how much work to get to veracity is actually going on out there?

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#145

Post by invig »

jacurtis wrote: post #71

Honestly AI's hallucinating isn't a whole lot different than real life. Only a small minority of humans fact check anything anymore before believing it. So "irl", we see people like Alex Jones that get up on their big platforms and start spewing nonsense, but if they sound confident enough and it confirms what you want out of the world, then people latch onto it as fact and don't bother to verify. You see this across…

Yes!

The AI is trained on human behaviour, it’s a mirror.

We’re delusional if we think humans are any better at this.

I think we’re also delusional if we think we can define what is true. At best we can give an approximation of what we think we know now.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#146

Post by gaganyaan »

danmaz74 wrote: post #68
jshen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The LLM AI technology generation is optimized to be fluently conversational and not to be factually correct all the time." I always find this point a bit odd because humans aren't "optimized" to be correct either. > "LLMs have no understanding of the underlying reality" I struggle with this one because I see both sides of it. I was making a prompt the other day and gave a CSV file as an input and told the LLM if c…

Humans aren't optimized to be correct, but they are optimized to survive and reproduce themselves in the real world. That's why we develop an understanding of the real world, while LLM can, at most, develop an understanding of human language and the constructs that human language can create. But without the napping that we have between that language and our experience of the world.

LLMs develop a model of the world, experienced through human-generated text. The same as I've never been to China, but I have an internal model of China due to experiencing it through human-generated text.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#147

Post by gaganyaan »

pdonis wrote: post #58
happytiger wrote: post #11

The LLM AI technology generation is optimized to be fluently conversational and not to be factually correct all the time. 1) Hallucinations often appear because LLMs are designed to create fluent, coherent text. 2) LLMs have no understanding of the underlying reality that language describes. 3) LLMs use statistics to generate language that is grammatically and semantically correct within the context of the prompt. It…

> All these criticisms of hallucinations are missing the point. Not if people need to be reminded that, as you say, LLMs are not designed to give reliable answers. Many, many people appear to believe that they are, since they rely on the answers in all kinds of contexts. For example, in past HN threads on LLMs, I have seen people say that they rely on LLM-generated code.

I rely on code written by AI and verified by me, particularly when the code is finicky or tedious but verification is simple. LLMs are more reliable than you're trying to assert, but blindly copy/pasting AI-generated code is a recipe for pain, just the same as blindly copy/pasting human-generated code from SO.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#148

Post by gaganyaan »

pdonis wrote: post #65
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs have no understanding of the underlying reality Not true. They are slowly gaining an understanding of reality by reverse engineering the relationships built into human languages. The only reason LLMs are getting better is because they are better modeling the world. At some point the only way to improve token prediction is to gain an understanding of the world.

> They are slowly gaining an understanding of reality by reverse engineering the relationships built into human languages. Perhaps the people building LLMs are doing this, but the LLMs themselves are not. LLMs are just generating text. They aren't "reverse engineering" anything. > The only reason LLMs are getting better is because they are better modeling the world. No, they are getting better at generating text that…

> LLMs are just generating text.

I really can't stand these low-effort takes. It's like saying "Human brains are just meat". You can summarize anything badly, but it's not helpful to the conversation.

Whatever quibbles you have aside, LLMs are generating useful text, today. At some point you're just pointlessly privileging meat over silicon.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#149

Post by gaganyaan »

chrisco255 wrote: post #84
GuB-42 wrote: post #63

AI hallucinations are the opposite of creativity. They give the most obvious wrong answer possible. For example, ask an AI about an unknown basketball player, it will probably describe it at fit and tall, because that's how we expect basketball players to be. That may be a good observation, but certainly not creativity. If instead it told the story of someone short and obese, with details on how he got to play basket…

Right, this is also why we don't see breakthroughs in science or literature from AI.

Yet. We're in the infancy of the current approach, and hardware is getting better all the time. Let's see what happens when it grows up.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#150

Post by gaganyaan »

mjr00 wrote: post #34
LeoPanthera wrote: post #22

This is an odd article. To me, it seems like the "creative" arts are an ideal arena for AI. After all, there's no such thing as "wrong" art. The article says "well, sometimes what it makes is bad". Well big deal. A lot of human-created art is awful too.

> This is an odd article. To me, it seems like the "creative" arts are an ideal arena for AI. After all, there's no such thing as "wrong" art. Yeah but who wants to consume art purely generated by AI (that is, not human-created with AI support)? Most art sites have had blanket bans, or at least required tagging, on ai-generated art because people hate it so much. Or to put it another way: why are you in the comment s…

> who wants to consume art purely generated by AI

Most people won't care one bit. Some artists care strongly, hence the bans on artist-focused sites. When it's about as good or better than humans, people will consume it.

As for why people are still on HN, TBH a lot of these comments could be easily written by ChatGPT. What makes it worth it is seeing comments from people in the know, which is something ChatGPT can't replicate.

For your other comment about pixiv, people don't hate AI art, they hate low-effort trash. Most people, if they saw art they liked, wouldn't care who or what created it.

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