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LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

tomrenner.com

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Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#41

Post by danielbln »

lyu07282 wrote: post #23

I think it's interesting how gamers have developed a pretty healthy aversion to generative ai in video games. Steam and Itch both now make it mandatory that games disclose generative ai use and recently even beloved Larian Studios was under fire for using ai for concept art. Gamers hate that shit. I think that's good, but the whole "AI is literally not doing anything", that it's just some mass hallucination has to di…

> Gamers hate that shit.

Unless AI is used for code (which it is, surely, almost everywhere), then Gamers don't give a damn. Also, Larian didn't use it for concept art, they used it to generate the first mood board to give to the concept artist as a guideline. And then there is Ark Raiders, who uses AI for all their VO, and that game is a massive hit.

This is just a breathless bubble, the wider gaming audience couldn't give two shits if studios use AI or not.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#42

Post by lpcvoid »

lyu07282 wrote: post #23

I think it's interesting how gamers have developed a pretty healthy aversion to generative ai in video games. Steam and Itch both now make it mandatory that games disclose generative ai use and recently even beloved Larian Studios was under fire for using ai for concept art. Gamers hate that shit. I think that's good, but the whole "AI is literally not doing anything", that it's just some mass hallucination has to di…

I think the costs of LLMs (huge energy hunger, people being fired because of it, hostile takeover of human creativity, and it causing computer hardware to rise in cost exponentially) is by far larger than the uses (generating videos of fish with arms, programming slightly faster, writing slop emails to talented people).

I know LLMs won't vanish again magically, but I wish they would every time I have to deal with their output.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#43

Post by lxgr »

Considerations around current events aside, what exactly is the supposed "confidence trick" of mechanical or electronic calculators? They're labor-saving devices, not arbiters of truth, and as far as I can tell, they're pretty good at saving a lot of labor.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#45

Post by slg »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #3

I think anyone who thinks that LLMs are not intelligent in any sense is simply living in denial. They might not be intelligent in the same way a human is intelligent, they might make mistakes a person wouldn't make, but that's not the question. Any standard of intelligence devised before LLMs is passed by LLMs relatively easily. They do things that 10 years ago people would have said are impossible for a computer to…

>I can run claude code on my laptop with an instruction like "fix the sound card on this laptop" and it will analyze what my current settings are, determine what might be wrong, devise tests to have me gather information it can't gather itself, run commands to probe hardware for it's capabilities, and finally offer a menu of solutions, give the commands to implement the solution, and finally test that the solution works perfectly. Can you do that?

Yes, I have worked in small enough companies in which the developers just end up becoming the default IT help desk. I never had any formal training in IT, but most of that kind of IT work can be accomplished with decent enough Google skills. In a way, it worked the same as you and the LLM. I would go poking through settings, run tests to gather info, run commands, and overall just keep trying different solutions until either one worked or it became reasonable to give up. I'm sure many people here have had similar experiences doing the same thing in their own families. I'm not too impressed with an LLM doing that. In this example, it's functionally just improving people's Googling skills.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#46

Post by latexr »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #39
latexr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those aren’t mutually exclusive; something can be both useful and a con. When a con man sells you a cheap watch for an high price, what you get is still useful—a watch that tells the time—but you were also still conned, because what you paid for is not what was advertised. You overpaid because you were tricked about what you were buying. LLMs are useful for many things, but they’re also not nearly as beneficial and p…

I think the following things can both be true at the same time: * LLMs are a useful tool in a variety of circumstances. * Sam Altman is personally incentivised to spout a great deal of hyped-up rubbish about both what LLMs are capable of, and can be capable of.

Yes, that’s the point I’m making. In the scenario you’re describing, that would make Sam Altman a con man. Alternatively, he could simply be delusional and/or stupid. But given his history of deceit with Loopt and Worldcoin, there is precedent for the former.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#47

Post by BoxOfRain »

leogao wrote: post #21

> The purpose here is not to responsibly warn us of a real threat. If that were the aim there would be a lot more shutting down of data centres and a lot less selling of nuclear-weapon-level-dangerous chatbots. you're lumping together two very different groups of people and pointing out that their beliefs are incompatible. of course they are! the people who think there is a real threat are generally different people…

> nuclear-weapon-level-dangerous chatbots

I feel this framing in general says more about our attitudes to nuclear weapons than it does about chatbots. The 'Peace Dividend' era which is rapidly drawing to a close has made people careless when they talk about the magnitude of effects a nuclear war would have.

AI can be misused, but it can't be misused to the point an enormously depopulated humanity is forced back into subsistence agriculture to survive, spending centuries if not millennia to get back to where we are now.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#48

Post by ACCount37 »

mossTechnician wrote: post #2

"AI safety" groups are part of what's described here: you might assume from the general "safety" label that organizations like PauseAI or ControlAI would focus things like data center pollution, the generation of sexual abuse material, causing mental harm, or many other things we can already observe. But they don't. Instead, "AI safety" organizations all appear to exclusively warn of unstoppable, apocalyptic, and unp…

I'd rather the "AI safety" of the kind you want didn't exist.

The catastrophic AI risk isn't "oh no, people can now generate pictures of women naked".

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#49

Post by ManuelKiessling »

krystofee wrote: post #32

I disagree with the "confidence trick" framing completely. My belief in this tech isn't based on marketing hype or someone telling me it's good – it's based on cold reality of what I'm shipping daily. The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented. Even a year ago this wouldn't have been possible, it really feels like an inflection point. I'm seeing legitimate 10x gains because I'm not writing code any…

This. By now I don’t understand how anyone can still argue in the abstract while it’s trivial to simply give it a try and collect cold, hard facts.

It’s like arguing that the piano in the room is out of tune and not bothering to walk over to the piano and hit its keys.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#50

Post by vanderZwan »

krystofee wrote: post #32

I disagree with the "confidence trick" framing completely. My belief in this tech isn't based on marketing hype or someone telling me it's good – it's based on cold reality of what I'm shipping daily. The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented. Even a year ago this wouldn't have been possible, it really feels like an inflection point. I'm seeing legitimate 10x gains because I'm not writing code any…

Even assuming all of what you said is true, none of it disproves the arguments in the article. You're talking about the technology, the article is about the marketing of the technology.

The LLM marketing exploits fear and sympathy. It pressures people into urgency. Those things can be shown and have been shown. Whether or not the actual LLM based tools genuinely help you has nothing to do with that.

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