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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#141

Post by duped »

pyridines wrote: post #72
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…

I just can't accept that it possesses no intelligence. It is not equivalent to human intelligence, obviously, but how can a system without some semblance of rational thinking solve open math problems? Even composing earlier human work into something novel requires intelligence and understanding on some level.

I don't think statistically driven prediction implies reasoning or intelligence.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#142

Post by cryzinger »

davidgh wrote: post #99
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?

I understand the sentiment, but not quite what I’m thinking. It’s not that the AI is necessarily wrong, it’s more like, it replaces clarity with rich but unhelpful text. Maybe like candy. Full of flavor, texture and color but lacking the nutrients.

The way I like to describe it is that it feels slippery, like it's been polished down to oblivion and my eyes slide right off of it. There's no place to find a mental foothold, and if you zoom in there aren't any details.

But I also like your candy analogy because I think it's spot-on for how LLM text superficially looks informational/nutritious, even though it's actually just junk.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#143

Post by bayindirh »

pyridines wrote: post #133
bayindirh wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, what I would say is the tasks which are handled in a passable manner by LLMs can be mathematically modeled with some reasonable accuracy.

Many things are predicted by models in our planet. From weather to production and material science. Building the model needs intelligence, running the model does not.

The person who came up with the formulae for CFD was intelligent. The computer running the model is not. Same for LLMs, chess engines, engine ECUs and financial prediction systems.

Again, for the example’s sake; the person who came up with an algorithm is intelligent. The model mixing its training data to emit something similar is not.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#144

Post by efilife »

LelouBil wrote: post #62
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…

For some research I looked up some very old Reddit threads a couple of days ago. And, Oh my god, you can actually see how this style of writing influenced AI writing today, I constantly had to remind myself: "this was posted before ChatGPT released". The reddit influence is especially true for "storytelling" writing.

I experienced the same lately. Even dug some of my old posts where I put in the effort and formatted them using reddit's markdown. Wouldn't dare it today

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#145

Post by renyicircle »

nozzlegear wrote: post #97
fragmede wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/blader/humanizer

The problem is the well's been poisoned just by the fact that I know this is AI trying to hide AI, so I'm already poised to look at the examples and declare "aha! this is obviously AI!" Moreover, it's not single sentences or phrases that make AI text stick out (though obviously those are the biggest tells), it's the text taken as a whole. When you read the full output example in that repo, it seems obvious to me that…

I agree that it feels off and I wonder what I would have thought if I'd seen the "after" example without knowing it's AI output put through a humanizer. Would I think much about the weird use of the word "honest"? About "that's the Lisbon I kept thinking about, not the castle"? Or how the story feels very impersonal somehow, with the author just mentioning their calves and legs sometimes as the only way of convincing the reader of their humanity?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#146

Post by moritzwarhier »

cpeterso wrote: post #140
moritzwarhier wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Yeah that's a very good example, because it also demonstrates the "alignment issue", assuming ChatGPT wants to avoid confirming accusations of murder, or simply using the word without strong evidence.

So kinda charitable :)

I was recently wondering for a minute, shame on me, what "the stand of the deployment" means, because in the given context, it was almost halfway meaningful to consider the AI thinking that the deployment "has a stand" on something, when compared to the development environment.

Jargon is even worse though, and I've not yet verifies whether it gets reinforced by language mixing.

"Decider-verifyer resolution" was kind of neat, however, it wasn't some sophisticated machine, it was the verification loop I agreed on with the AI (mix of tools usage and manual steps).

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#147

Post by hdndjsbbs »

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…

The junior engineers at my job have a terrible problem of writing AI "proposals" to problems. The proposals are all extremely detailed and verbose to a thought-terminating extent. It takes a lot of effort and self-control to parse out the actual "ideas".

I think of the Dwight Eisenhower quote: "Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable."

The process of thinking through a system and communicating your design to other humans is a core part of software engineering. You want to build the right abstractions and communicate the right level of detail. Delegating all that thought to an LLM means your proposal isn't clear to the target audience, and it's not helping the author to understand the problem.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#148

Post by arjie »

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…

Yeah, I have the same problem. There's a good quote example of this:

> There’s a growing scissor between people who are happy to read AI and those who violently bounce off from it.

> People adapt in different ways — and some people absolutely cannot look at it. That cognitive split creates a surprisingly powerful opportunity: you can write something that, technically, sits right there on the page, yet an entire sub-population will be incapable of staying with it long enough to actually read it. You can hide entire sub-structures in plain sight. It’s not avoidance — it’s adaptive obfuscation.

> The paragraph before this one was the only thing generated in this essay and if you just skipped over it I highly recommend reading and really understanding what it’s saying.

It's quite effective. I think this kind of text functions like the chumboxes you see at the bottom. Taboola and so on. Just mental ad-block takes over.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#149

Post by malfist »

duped wrote: post #141
pyridines wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't accept that it possesses no intelligence. It is not equivalent to human intelligence, obviously, but how can a system without some semblance of rational thinking solve open math problems? Even composing earlier human work into something novel requires intelligence and understanding on some level.

I don't think statistically driven prediction implies reasoning or intelligence.

Its a mirror to human intelligence. Regurgitating phrasing to match what someone who can reason put together, but it isn't any more intelligent than the reflection of you in the mirror is.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#150

Post by fwip »

cpeterso wrote: post #140
moritzwarhier wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Just the other day I was using text-to-speech with Gemini, and for some reason, it transcribed my full query in Hindi (in the middle of an English conversation), and naturally the LLM responded with Hindi as well.

I don't know exactly what I said, but after translating it back, it appears to have attempted a phonetic transcription of my words (rather than translating my actual question).

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