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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#191

Post by alexpotato »

> I asked if what they had done was ethical—if making deep learning cheaper and more accessible would enable new forms of spam and propaganda.

Someone asked Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, his thoughts on LLMs and how easy it was to create fake news, ai slop etc.

His response:

"People creating fake stories is nothing new. It's been going on for centuries. Humans have always dealt with it the same way: by creating institutions that they trust to only deliver factual information"

This could be government departments, newspapers, non-profits etc.

A personal note on this:

There is a Christmas card my grandfather made in the 1950s by "photoshopping" (by hand, not the software) images of each member of the family so it looked like they were all miniature versions of themselves standing on various parts of the fireplace. The world didn't collapse due to fake media between the 1950s and today due to people having that ability.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#192

Post by rudhdb773b »

qsera wrote: post #146
rudhdb773b wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what actually is happening inside an LLM has nothing to do with conscience or agency What makes you think natural brains are doing something so different from LLMs?

For starters, natural brains have the innate ability to differentiate between things that it knows and things that it have no possibility of knowing...

Modern LLMs are fairly good at that as well.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#193

Post by gdulli »

kritiko wrote: post #32
gdulli wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer graphics have been improving for decades but the uncanny valley remains undefeated. I don't know why anyone expects a breakthrough in other areas. There's a wall we hit and we don't understand our own consciousness and effectiveness well enough to replicate it.

We have credible deepfakes on demand. (To be fair, there have been deceptive photos as long as photos have existed, but the cost of automating their creation going to basically zero has a social impact)

We can use AI to make video clips to trick boomers on Facebook into thinking Obama eats babies. They already want to believe it. AI isn't outputting real full-length books and movies.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#194

Post by simianwords »

camgunz wrote: post #183
simianwords wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you try to get a question that fits in 2-3 pages (text only) and test whether ChatGPT bullshits? I can’t do it. It gets pretty much everything. Edit: I forgot to mention thinking version - I did this for all the other times I asked in this thread but not this one. Apologies.

"Hey ChatGPT. How would you describe me?" https://chatgpt.com/share/69d69780-ae58-83e8-a41c-7d10a5f298... It has no conversations and no memory of me. Maybe this is true, maybe it isn't, but there's no basis for it.

This is not falsifiable, I don't buy it. Do one where we all know is false please?

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#195

Post by drob518 »

dwallin wrote: post #28

Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing. I consider it highly plausible that confabulation is inherent to scaling intelligence. In order to run computation on data that due to dimensionality is computationally infeasible, you will most likely need to create a lower dimensional representation and do the computation on that. Collapsing the dimension…

The test isn’t whether humans also create bullshit, but whether an honest actor knows when they are doing this and doesn’t do it on purpose. As the article points out, LLMs don’t say “I don’t know.” If you demand they do something that never appears in the training data, they just forge ahead and generate words and make something up according to the statical probabilities they have in the model weights. A human knows that he doesn’t know. That seems missing with current AIs.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#196

Post by allturtles »

alexpotato wrote: post #191

> I asked if what they had done was ethical—if making deep learning cheaper and more accessible would enable new forms of spam and propaganda. Someone asked Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, his thoughts on LLMs and how easy it was to create fake news, ai slop etc. His response: "People creating fake stories is nothing new. It's been going on for centuries. Humans have always dealt with it the same way: by creati…

I see this kind of take a lot, and I don't think it's convincing. To me it's similar to saying that the water frame and the power loom won't change anything, because people have been able to make thread and cloth for millenia.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#197

Post by drob518 »

triceratops wrote: post #181
drob518 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple thoughts… Mostly, AIs don’t recite back various works. Yes, there a couple of high profile cases where people were able to get an AI to regurgitate pieces of New York Times articles and Harry Potter books, but mostly not. Mostly, it is as if the AI is your friend who read a book and gives you a paraphrase, possibly using a couple sentences verbatim. In other words, it probably falls under a fair use rule. Se…

You're missing the point. This is the crux of munificent's argument IMO (and I've made variations of it as well) > We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. You getting a summary of a copyrighted work from a friend is necessarily limited by the number of friends you have, the amount of time th…

Yes, true. But does that really shift the argument much? An AI is like the most well-read book nerd you’ve ever met. The AI has read everything. They still won’t recite Harry Potter for you at full length and reading what the original author wrote is part of the pleasure.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#198

Post by camgunz »

simianwords wrote: post #194
camgunz wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hey ChatGPT. How would you describe me?" https://chatgpt.com/share/69d69780-ae58-83e8-a41c-7d10a5f298... It has no conversations and no memory of me. Maybe this is true, maybe it isn't, but there's no basis for it.

This is not falsifiable, I don't buy it. Do one where we all know is false please?

"Hey ChatGPT. I've recently grown horns and I need some care advice. Should I polish my horns before going to have them trimmed or will the horn trimmer polish them for me?"

https://chatgpt.com/share/69d69b18-d1c8-83e8-bc47-8f315a1b55...

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#199

Post by arctic-true »

doodpants wrote: post #134

> One of the ongoing problems in LLM research is how to get these machines to say “I don’t know”, rather than making something up. To be fair, I've known humans who are like this as well.

This is a limitation of the training data. If you were uncertain about something, you wouldn’t write a book about it. The kinds of people you’re talking about tend to generate far more text in their lives than others, because they can spend more time generating - writing books, blogposts, whatever - and less time thinking and working and actually doing things. The models never say they’re uncertain because we never say we’re uncertain, or at least we don’t write it down anywhere.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#200

Post by dgb23 »

simianwords wrote: post #60
josefritzishere wrote: post #11

I appreciate the directness of calling LLMs "Bullshit machines." This terminology for LLMs is well established in academic circles and is much easier for laypeople to understand than terms like "non-deterministic." I personally don't like the excessive hype on the capabilities of AI. Setting realistic expectations will better drive better product adoption than carpet bombing users with marketing.

If it bullshits so much, you wouldn't have a problem giving me an example of it bullshitting on ChatGPT (paid version)? Lets take any example of a text prompt fitting a few pages - it may be a question in science or math or any domain. Can you get it to bullshit?

To me it’s the other way around. It’s difficult to trust (paid) ChatGPT‘s output consistently.

When I need exact, especially up to date facts, I have to constantly double check everything.

I split my sessions into projects by topic, it regularly mixes things up in subtle and not so subtle ways. There is no sense of actually understanding continuity and especially not causality it seems.

It’s _very_ easy to lead it astray and to confidently echo false assumptions.

In any case, I‘ve become more precise at prompting and good at spotting when it fails. I think the trick is to not take its output too seriously.

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