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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#131

Post by kaffekaka »

cyanydeez wrote: post #91
Flamkuchlo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure you are not doing the same thing with other texts? I started to skim a lot more text due to me having read a lot. Like in news article, i stoped reading the first paragraph because it repeats just what it was already written in the short subtext. Then there is the second paragarph which is used to have some historical view or whatever it is.

I started skimming reports im required to produce quarterly snd annually. I designed them to provide novel information at start and end so I can update them easily. The problem I encounter is both my memory is degrading, but since these reports are largely duplicative, knowing which version im remembering is technically impossible since theres so much overlap. The overlap is tge same problem as context poisoning. Id…

Interesting anecdote!

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#132

Post by fluoridation »

rnd33 wrote: post #108
bayindirh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just filled to the brim with relations between things. It's good at searching a very large meaning space and create correlations. What it does is to cover great distances and find related things in that large space which needs a long time and large corpus of knowledge to find the connection. This is not intelligence. It's just a good correlation engine with a very big albeit lossy database of things.

Intelligence is compression, compression requires subtraction, and for some reason LLMs are not good at subtracting. To create a coherent model you kinda have to subtract correlations until only the essential parts are still there. What I don't understand is why LLMs haven't been able to do this yet, if it's the harness or some orchestration layer above the LLM that is needed. Because fundamentally if you can identif…

Intelligence is compression? What do you mean? Intuitively that doesn't seem right.

>What I don't understand is why LLMs haven't been able to do this yet

LLMs are just trained on what humans have said. Why is it surprising that it's still not possible to reconstruct the intelligence that wrote all that by working backwards? Think of your own work experience. When you look at a piece of code, say, are you always able to discern why the person did what they did, just from the code, with no additional context?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#133

Post by pyridines »

bayindirh wrote: post #101
pyridines wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very fact that it is able to search within a meaning-space demonstrates that it understands semantics, to some extent. Philosophically, that is profound, for something that is just one big matrix multiplication. Drawing connections between things in meaning-space is surely a facet of intelligence.

It’s not intelligence if you are the one who gives the correlations to the model in the pre-training. It’s Word2Vec, applied. Model doesn’t learn anything. You embed these correlations and build it from there. It just searches the space. As my AI professor said in the first lecture: “All AI is advanced search”.

Okay, I guess you're right that its ability to do this is just correlational, which doesn't imply it has any understanding. However, you have to conclude that some tasks which we used to believe required intelligence don't actually require any, which is disconcerting.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#134

Post by xpct »

tingletech wrote: post #86

In high school, a teacher gave me a copy of "How To Read Better And Faster" which teaches you speed reading. This came in very handy in college. I find that when I try to speed read modern human writing, there are often errors (like missing or misused words) or awkward expressions that I do have to slow down and think harder a lot to really parse it. With AI writing, it's sort of self redundant and the information de…

That's interesting. You're saying speed reading helps you grasp information density of text?

As someone who hasn't practiced speed reading, how does that happen? Is it something about the way your brain tries to connect ideas from different parts of the text? Or the redundancy making the signal more stable?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#135

Post by kaffekaka »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #102
mattbruv wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish there was a name for this situation. It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components. Bullshit?

No no no. Harry Frankfurt wrote at length the difference between liars (who care about the truth, and twist it) and bullshitters (who don’t care about the truth, but just the way they’re received). This is some third category of untruth. Almost more sinister than the other two altogether.

"A third category of untruth" is a great expression, thank you.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#136

Post by xpct »

dsign wrote: post #52

I don't like AI-generated text at work, at all. It feels lifeless and unfocused. But what I hate the most is that it is objectively better than what I had before. No typos, clear structure, and, regrettably, the verbosity and autistic obsession with detail of the LLM is more actionable and useful than the human guy who wrote lists of commands and URLs as documentation, without explaining anything. Or the colleague wh…

I'd say my experience is different. Even from people whose communication writing I didn't find that useful, they seem to have a better frame of mind than LLMs do. Though, I never encountered people like the examples you gave.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#137

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

causal wrote: post #30

There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is dee…

I've got a 3 step instruction to compress Ai text into useful info.

1. Ask it to write according to the Google Developer Documentation guidelines. Gets rid of fluff, less emotional statements, no it's not x it's why.

2. Tell it you have extreme ADHD and need everything condensed as much as possible. You can always ask for expansion on an answer later.

3. Bullet points whenever possible.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#138

Post by sa-code »

PaulHoule wrote: post #84
TalkingCodeMonk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. No matter how much investors and tech companies want you to believe that they are on the verge of super intelligence, nothing I've seen to date can…

Some of it the effect of tells. “It’s not X, it’s Y” is not a bad pattern but it was baked into the instruction following training set just like the other patterns. I catch myself about to use it and use something else because I want to look human. I have, a few times, tried to use AI to write something that I was struggling to find the words and I just didn’t like how it didn’t seem like my voice. If there was just…

Someone shared with me this system prompt that at least makes assistant outputs usable

    For information retrieval tasks, I want you to provide links to sources and use exact quotes as much as possible. When using a source, consider if it is primary or secondary information. If secondary sources are found, search again for primary sources. Sources and quotes, if applicable, should be mentioned in the answer first before the rest of the response with links.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#139

Post by bigstrat2003 »

rappatic wrote: post #6

Claude has become noticeably, painfully worse at writing in the last six months. At this point it’s practically useless for anything except code.

It's not good for writing code either, despite the many claims to the contrary. At best you come out even on speed as you have to review everything it does. At worst it actually slows you down as you clean up its mess.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#140

Post by cpeterso »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #111
GPerson wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should notice that it is constantly inventing plausible jargon, some of which may or may not have been used in some specific context.

It gets worse with language mixing, but I can't help from finding it funny at times, unless it bites me.

Yes, I've had both ChatGPT and Perplexity return English answers with Hindi words sprinkled in (for totally unrelated queries).

For example, I asked ChatGPT to summarize a long news story and it substituted the Hindi equivalent हत्या for the word "murder", as if ChatGPT was trying to work around alignment training or keyword block lists that discourage it from using the word "murder".

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