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What happens when people don't understand how AI works

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Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#141

Post by duxup »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #7

LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call i…

The terminology is so confusing in AI right now.

I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them.

Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use terms like "thinking" or similar terms.

I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#142

Post by voidhorse »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #7

LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call i…

Great take. In my view, a major issue right now is that the people pushing these tools on the populace have never read Barthes and in many cases probably don't even know the name. If they had an inkling of literary and social history, they might be a bit more cautious and conscientious of how they frame these tools to people.

We are currently subject to the whims of corporations with absurd amounts of influence and power, run by people who barely understand the sciences, who likely know nothing about literary history beyond what the chatbot can summarize for them, have zero sociological knowledge or communications understanding, and who don't even write well-engineered code 90% of the time but are instead ok with shipping buggy crap to the masses as long as it means they get to be the first ones to do so, all this coupled with an amount of hubris unmatched by even the greatest protagonists of greek literature. Society has given some of the stupidest people the greatest amount of resources and power, and now we are paying for it.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#143

Post by whilenot-dev »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #105
zzbzq wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLMs do have "latent knowledge," indisputably, the latent knowledge is beyond reproach. Because what we do know about the "black box" is that inside it, is a database of not just facts, but understanding, and we know the model "understands" nearly every topic better than any human. Where the doubt-worthy part happens is the generative step, since it is tasked with producing a new "understanding" that didn't alrea…

LLMs have latent knowledge insofar as it can be distilled out of the internet...

*or any digitized proprietary works, just as long as they can be parsed correctly. don't worry, the means of how to optain these works doesn't seem to matter[0]

[0]: https://www.arl.org/blog/training-generative-ai-models-on-co...

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#144

Post by mort96 »

tim333 wrote: post #109
suddenlybananas wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until it makes stuff up.

Well nothing's perfect. It actually got that one wrong - it said "not typically effective" which isn't true.

Nothing is perfect, but some things let you validate the answer. Search engines give you search results, not an answer. You can use the traditional methods for evaluating the reliability of a resource. An academic resource focused on the toxicity of various kinds of chemicals is probably fairly trustworthy, while a blog from someone trying to sell you healing crystals probably isn't.

When you're using ChatGPT to find information, you have no information if what it's regurgitating is from a high reliability source or a low reliability source, or if it's just a random collection of words whose purpose is simply to make grammatical sense.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#145

Post by cratermoon »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #7

LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call i…

This exact characterization was noted two years ago. https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#146

Post by gaganyaan »

dingnuts wrote: post #140
hexaga wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hacker News deserves a stronger counterargument than “this is silly.” Their counterargument is that said structural definition is overly broad, to the point of including any and all forms of symbolic communication (which is all of them). Because of that, your argument based on it doesn't really say anything at all about AI or divination, yet still seems 'deep' and mystical and wise. But this is a seeming only. And…

You're misunderstanding the point of structural analysis. Comparing AI to divination isn't about making everything equivalent, but about highlighting specific shared structures that reveal how humans interact with these systems. The fact that this comparison can be extended to other domains doesn't make it meaningless. The issue isn't "cached intuitions" about divination, but rather that you're reading the comparison…

> humans tend to project meaning onto ambiguous outputs from systems they perceive as having special insight or authority

This applies just as well to other humans as it does AI. It's overly-broad to the point of meaninglessness.

The insight doesn't illuminate.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#147

Post by albedoa »

dingnuts wrote: post #140
hexaga wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hacker News deserves a stronger counterargument than “this is silly.” Their counterargument is that said structural definition is overly broad, to the point of including any and all forms of symbolic communication (which is all of them). Because of that, your argument based on it doesn't really say anything at all about AI or divination, yet still seems 'deep' and mystical and wise. But this is a seeming only. And…

You're misunderstanding the point of structural analysis. Comparing AI to divination isn't about making everything equivalent, but about highlighting specific shared structures that reveal how humans interact with these systems. The fact that this comparison can be extended to other domains doesn't make it meaningless. The issue isn't "cached intuitions" about divination, but rather that you're reading the comparison…

> That's a meaningful observation, regardless of whether AI is "causally disentangled from reality" or not.

And regardless of how many words someone uses in their failed attempt at "gotcha" that nobody else is playing. There are certainly some folks acting silly here, and it's not the vast majority of us who have no problem interpreting and engaging with the structural analysis.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#148

Post by AlecSchueler »

duxup wrote: post #141
kelseyfrog wrote: post #7

LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call i…

The terminology is so confusing in AI right now. I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them. Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use terms like "thinking" or similar terms. I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.

The question is what's different in your own "thinking?"

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#149

Post by AlecSchueler »

tough wrote: post #71
kelseyfrog wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, some people stepped up to the Oracle and asked how to conquer Persia. Others probably asked where they left their sandals. The quality of the question doesn't change the structure of the act. You presented clear, factual queries. Great. But even there, all the components are still in play: you asked a question into a black box, received a symbolic-seeming response, evaluated its truth post hoc, and interpreted…

I always like to compare tongue in cheek, llm's with I-ching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching

Why?

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#150

Post by beardedwizard »

martindbp wrote: post #108

Many people who claim that people don't understand how AI works often have a very simplified view of the short comings of LLMs themselves, e.g. "it's just predicting the next token", "it's just statistics", "stochastic parrot" and seems to be grounded in what AI was 2-3 years ago. Rarely have they actually read the recent research on interpretability. It's clear LLMs are doing more than just pattern matching. They ma…

Apple recently published a paper that seems to disagree and plainly states it's just pattern matching along with tests to prove it.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think...

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