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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#151

Post by el_benhameen »

davidgh wrote: post #43

My son is currently learning Romanian and I was trying to help him with verbs. I don’t know Romanian but recalled when learning a foreign language for the first time it really helped me to break down how a verb form or tense worked in English, then learn the equivalent in the new language. So I wanted to make some charts and pages that he could use as learning resources. I used Claude to help. I don’t know how to qui…

This is a really good description of the problem. I’ve been trying to use Claude to get familiar with the mechanics of a new codebase, and there have been so many moments where I’ve stopped after reading the same paragraph five times in a row and thought “Am I tired? Or stupid? Or is this codebase just wildly more complex than anything I’ve seen before?” before realizing that it’s just taken English and smushed it around like a ball of clay into some abstract sculpture that kind of evokes something from real life.

I think part of it might be an innate feature of LLMs, but Claude seems extra prone to it lately. I ran the same query about the same codebase with Codex, and it gave me an answer that was about 1/4 the length and made me realize that it really wasn’t all that complex.

If nothing else, it’s good training for my own writing. I’ve been working on making myself be more straightforward and concise, and Claude’s writing is a good example of how cleaner prose is a functional choice, not just a stylistic one.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#152

Post by fallingbananna »

TalkingCodeMonk wrote: post #59
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 "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…

Are we sure there is some objective, technical definition of what is intelligence and what is not?

Isn't it rather a subjective philosophical concept? What if human intelligence is also a statistical model, trained by evolution to make decisions that lead to offspring?

The one major difference I see between AI and people is the ability to learn and memorize. All memory/learning solutions that current AI architectures offer just feel like workarounds and simply don't work anywhere near as a person learning something new and remembering it.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#154

Post by sonicrocketman »

Part of me likes the cliche Claude voice. Not because it's good, but because I can immediately recognize it. When I see it in the Claude app/code then it's fine. In the wild it's a sign to me that I shouldn't keep reading.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#155

Post by slopinthebag »

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…

Yep. It's like it's painful to read for me. It's because the next-token predictor is just mashing (mostly) grammatically-correct and plausible sentences together, without any real intention or meaning. So everything sounds plausible, but almost entirely void of meaning.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#156

Post by fwip »

causal wrote: post #119
iceflinger wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI-generated resources swamping the information environment only makes it more important to have the mental mechanisms for quickly filtering out their non-information.

Yeah I don't think the solution to a flood of useless information is to try and digest more of it.

Perhaps we'll all become metaphorical pandas, spending 14 hours a day ingesting nutrient-poor bamboo. (And producing a proportionate amount of excrement ourselves.)

I hope not.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#157

Post by hombre_fatal »

bayindirh wrote: post #143
pyridines wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

This starts to feel like you're defining the word intelligence out of any meaning and out of any way we apply that word.

So when LLMs can do all human knowledge work, and do it better than humans, we'll be in the mines listening to you go on about how it's actually just autocomplete or just math, a distinction that apparently means nothing.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#158

Post by pyridines »

bayindirh wrote: post #143
pyridines wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

I get what you're saying. The thing itself is just math. I'll just say it depends on how you define intelligence. If at some point we're be able to simulate a human brain with 100% accuracy, I would say that it is intelligent, it sounds like you would not. (I don't mean to imply consciousness or personhood or anything else by "intelligent".)

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#159

Post by moritzwarhier »

fwip wrote: post #150
cpeterso wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Good to know that at least Gemini hasn't forgotten about its true roots :)

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#160

Post by renyicircle »

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…

It's like if on any website you went to you saw a lot of posts written by the same guy over and over again. Even if he used different names, you'd start to recognize him eventually because of his style. Seeing as he doesn't say a lot of valuable stuff, you'd also learn to skip whatever he says.

I do worry that it's just survivorship bias and we're also consuming higher-quality AI output that's indistinguishable from human writing, but we focus on the raw, unedited, low-effort AI slop and think that we're good at recognizing AI text. Even if we really are at the moment, it might not be long until AI companies figure it out. I'm not sure why they haven't yet, given how many books they've burned for this already. Maybe it's just more efficient for the model to stick to a single way of writing, I don't know. But when that point comes, we'll be back to the usual way of reading and interpreting text because there would be no way to tell what produced it.

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