Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 196 posts

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

#181

Post by timacles »

OrsonSmelles wrote: post #154
timacles wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing art with pretty pictures. AI "art" is not art, they are just pictures. It has no meaning, it has no context, it is not inspired by anything. Art has depth, art has emotion. Theres no AI pieces that someone "loves", theres nothing beyond, oh this is a cool image, it just doesnt exist.

>Art has depth, art has emotion But significant portions of those qualities are imputed by the viewer! The artist has their own intent and experience during the creation of the art, but that only inheres in the art insofar as another mind can later recover some of that feeling upon viewing. Huge parts of the meaning of ancient (and more recent) art are lost forever because they depended on never-recorded cultural or…

All you say is true but that is still not the point

Ai does not and cannot create art, it’s as simple as that.

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

#182

Post by famouswaffles »

pdonis wrote: post #160
famouswaffles wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ? That's not a big difference lol. The world can be sufficiently represented in text. and bolting in additional modalities to a transformer is trivial. Could just as well be images and audio also. You think you experience the "true" world ? You don't. You experience a slice of it that your brain often further fabricates at parts. To the birds that feel and sense electromagnetic waves intuitively to guide travels,…

> That's not a big difference lol. You must be joking. You really think there's not a big difference between a corpus of text downloaded from the Internet and the entire actual world? Or even the sense-data that humans (or birds, for that matter) take in from the world? (And that doesn't even take into account the actions that humans, and birds, take in the world, and then compare the results with what their internal…

I'm not joking. Obviously there's a difference but it's not one of kind. There is a projection of the world in text.

>Yes, but an LLM isn't a bird any more than it is a human. LLMs don't experience anything.

Who is arguing whether LLMs are humans ? That's such an irrelevant point. The question is whether they are intelligent and understand which they are by any criteria that is actually testable. Nobody cares about building an artificial human.

>LLMs don't experience anything.

You don't know that

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

#183

Post by gaganyaan »

danmaz74 wrote: post #179
gaganyaan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a huge difference between your model and an LLM model in your example. Your model "knows" that China has rivers (of which you have direct experience), coastlines (same), trees, mountains etc. etc. An LLM has no tangible experience of any of the concepts included in the text.

Both my internal model and an LLM are built from sensory data. My model knows what a river is from having experienced it through sensors that an LLM doesn't currently have, but don't expect that limitation to last.

Also, given how many words humans have written describing every part of the experience, LLMs can generate a pretty good understanding of it as-is.

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

#184

Post by nuancebydefault »

pdonis wrote: post #158
nuancebydefault wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans do not _know_ the external world either. All humans have is perceptions from media like sounds, images and text! Internally we try to make a model of the world based on those perceptions. Any blanks are filled in by creativity ! Think about it, when we write or speak we start from some internalized model (which is mostly imperfect) and then we build text around it that feels fluent and consistent. I would argu…

> Humans do not _know_ the external world either. All humans have is perceptions Wrong. Human beings can act on the world as well as perceive it, and humans have rich internal models of the world that get updated continously as a result of those rich two-way interactions. > I would argue, human reasoning is conceptually not so much different from LLMs as one might think. I would argue that this is either an incredibl…

> Human beings can act on the world as well as perceive it

Conceptually this is the same for LLMs.

Input/perceive -> human/LLM -> output/act. You might say the acting part for LLMs is not autonomous but that is only dependent on how much agency is given to LLMs. LLMs outputs are massively used, hence their outputs lead to actions.

> and humans have rich internal models of the world that get updated continously as a result of those rich two-way interactions.

What is different from LLMs: rich, continuous. I would argue these are quantative and qualitative traits that fall outside of what I meant with "conceptually".

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

#185

Post by OrsonSmelles »

timacles wrote: post #181
OrsonSmelles wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Art has depth, art has emotion But significant portions of those qualities are imputed by the viewer! The artist has their own intent and experience during the creation of the art, but that only inheres in the art insofar as another mind can later recover some of that feeling upon viewing. Huge parts of the meaning of ancient (and more recent) art are lost forever because they depended on never-recorded cultural or…

All you say is true but that is still not the point Ai does not and cannot create art, it’s as simple as that.

Just to be clear, even when a human writes and refines prompts, tweaks parameters, and iterates generation until they see something they imagined but lacked the traditional art skills to produce... we have not ended up with art? (If someone posts all 2000 iterates of their last prompt, that's bad social behavior, but it's hard for me to feel like it "un-arts" the results.) Or is there some other generation procedure you're imagining that's responsible for the alleged non-art?

(Lest I be accused of moving goalposts or trying to sound less crazy, I want to double down on my original motivation that I think we need to make philosophical space for minds with agency and potential personhood that did not evolve in meat. I have no confidence that that will become urgent in my lifetime, but I think it will someday and it would be nice to be culturally through with the arguments about whether it could possibly ever make art before we're forced to argue about whether it can vote or join the priesthood or whatever!)

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

#186

Post by pdonis »

PoignardAzur wrote: post #109
pdonis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This subjects comes up in every single discussion on LLMs, and every time someone asserts with perfect confidence that LLMs couldn't possibly have a world model. But that confidence is based on intuition, not on any empirical observations. All the research we've seen so far points in the other direction: sufficiently trained LLMs do have a world model that you can find in their weights, changing these weights changes…

> LLMs couldn't possibly have a world model

I'm not asserting that they "couldn't possibly". I'm asserting that they don't--as in, none of the LLMs we have today have a world model. Perhaps someone might invent a different something in the future that they call an "LLM" that does have a world model, but no such thing exists now.

> that confidence is based on intuition, not on any empirical observations

No, it's not based on either of those. It's based on the explicit descriptions of how existing LLMs work by the people who made them. Their descriptions make clear that LLMs are just confabulating text based on a given prompt and their training data. The LLM doesn't make any connection at all between the text and anything else.

Contrast, for example, with Wolfram Alpha. If you give Wolfram Alpha the prompt "What is the distance from New York to Tokyo", it doesn't confabulate text based on that prompt and some corpus of training data. It first parses the text and infers that the correct response involves a lookup in its geographic database (note that you can skip this step by explicitly selecting the particular tool that does this); then it does the lookup; then it renders the response into text form and outputs it. That is what having a (rudimentary) world model looks like. LLMs do nothing of the sort.

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

#187

Post by pdonis »

gaganyaan wrote: post #164
pdonis wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like saying "Human brains are just meat". No, it isn't, because human brains have rich semantic connections to the rest of the world. LLMs do not. So "LLMs are just generating text" is a justified description of their limitations, in a way that "human brains are just meat" is not.

> LLMs do not Prove it

I don't have to; the people who designed the LLMs have already done so by explicitly describing how they work.

See, for example, my contrast of what an LLM does with what Wolfram Alpha does upthread.

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

#188

Post by pdonis »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #184
pdonis wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans do not _know_ the external world either. All humans have is perceptions Wrong. Human beings can act on the world as well as perceive it, and humans have rich internal models of the world that get updated continously as a result of those rich two-way interactions. > I would argue, human reasoning is conceptually not so much different from LLMs as one might think. I would argue that this is either an incredibl…

> Human beings can act on the world as well as perceive it Conceptually this is the same for LLMs. Input/perceive -> human/LLM -> output/act. You might say the acting part for LLMs is not autonomous but that is only dependent on how much agency is given to LLMs. LLMs outputs are massively used, hence their outputs lead to actions. > and humans have rich internal models of the world that get updated continously as a r…

> Conceptually this is the same for LLMs.

No, it isn't. LLMs don't look at the results of their actions and update a world model. Humans do.

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

#189

Post by pdonis »

jshen wrote: post #171
pdonis wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the things that has been on my mind of late is the idea of how much of what humans call “correct” or “right” is actually socially generated pressures to conform And the only reason that is even a thing is that we humans have a concept of actually being right , which we can distinguish from "responding to socially generated pressures to conform".

I'm not sure I'd frame it that way. We seem to make decisions with our subconscious brains and our "rational" brains primarily rationalize a justification for that decision. Our brains are less concerned with being right than they are with justifying our subconscious behavior and fitting in with our tribe. Another example, our brains care far more about achieving and maintaining status than about being right. We seem…

> We seem to make decisions with our subconscious brains and our "rational" brains primarily rationalize a justification for that decision.

There is research that is claimed to show this, but it doesn't. All it actually shows is that the process of making a decision takes time, and involves many different parts of the brain. There is no separate "rationalization" that comes after the decision is made. It's all part of a single process that can't be decomposed into such separate parts.

In any case, all this is irrelevant to what I said. I said we humans have the concept of "actually being right". We don't always live up to that concept, but even making that observation, as you have, shows that we have the concept. If we didn't, we could not even make statements like this one of yours: "our brains care far more about achieving and maintaining status than about being right."

> We seem barely capable of objective thought at best.

I think you have a sadly impoverished view of human thought.

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

#190

Post by jshen »

pdonis wrote: post #189
jshen wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'd frame it that way. We seem to make decisions with our subconscious brains and our "rational" brains primarily rationalize a justification for that decision. Our brains are less concerned with being right than they are with justifying our subconscious behavior and fitting in with our tribe. Another example, our brains care far more about achieving and maintaining status than about being right. We seem…

> We seem to make decisions with our subconscious brains and our "rational" brains primarily rationalize a justification for that decision. There is research that is claimed to show this, but it doesn't. All it actually shows is that the process of making a decision takes time , and involves many different parts of the brain. There is no separate "rationalization" that comes after the decision is made. It's all part…

My view is based on the science.

Regarding the research that supports my claim, studies have been done to isolate the different parts of the brain where they tell one part to do something like get water, then they ask the other part of the brain why they got the water and it makes up a reason because it's not aware of what happened in the other part. This is eerily similar to LLMs hallucinating.

Post reply on HN