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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#181

Post by EA-3167 »

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 suspect like most you don't appreciate how terrifying statistical relationships become when you have truly vast data sets to train on... and also that we as humans aren't as shockingly unique as we think (compared to other humans I mean).

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#182

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

figers wrote: post #103
pyridines wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks interesting, but would you mind saying a sentence or two about why before I commit to an hour-long video? It looks like it shows how they work internally, which is sort of a non sequitur. Brains also work mechanistically. I'm claiming that any system which is able to do what AIs do must necessarily have some sort of intelligence.

fair reply to an hour video, Scott is just so good to hear his talk is better than I can explain it... go to 24 minutes and 07 seconds. it's statistically determining what the next word should be based on all the text it's been trained on. It's not intelligence and he shows what probability it puts on each word that it chooses, but also shows a lot of the other words it was thinking of using. In a later part he shows…

> Human intelligence doesn't get confused like that.

We do; this is the premise of many children's riddle-games, like the one that goes:

"What is white and rhymes with silk? > Milk. What is cheese made from? > Milk. > What do cows drink?"

At which point the riddle-guesser is very likely to answer "milk" even though the correct answer is "water".

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#183

Post by djeastm »

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…

> but is missing critical components.

The human spirit. When you read a real person's thoughts you can often intuit the thought processes that led them to write it which aids understanding. Or at least have a general idea of "where they're coming from". But an AI is missing that. It just knows everything, without a "thought process". Instead of a flawed 3d person, we get a nice 2d picture instead.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#184

Post by starkd »

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…

Exactly, AI-generated text reads so smoothly, that the same short-circuit shifts my attention away from deep focus and onto scanning of the text, looking ahead to get the gist of it. Forcing myself to read the text fully feels almost painful. It's like reading a terms-of-service or any boilerplate document.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#185

Post by bayindirh »

pyridines wrote: post #158
bayindirh wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".)

For me intelligence is a fairly clean-cut concept, and is somewhat inseparable from consciousness itself.

Briefly, any intelligent creature has internal stochastic processes like sensory inputs and feelings to a certain degree. These stochastic inputs and the creature's own actions change the creature in subtle or profound ways. An LLM has no such processes. You push inputs to the same static model, sans temperature which is just a randomness slider.

Considering the model even doesn't see the words and work on matrices of numbers is even more telling. One needs to add "tools" and other "experts" to overcome the shortcomings caused by this modus operandi.

I can call the algorithm/model smart as in a smartwatch. It can mimic certain things well while having none of the underlying foundation beneath it, or redirect some of the things to correct tools to get deterministic and accurate results if it can't evaluate the query inside its own network in a sane manner.

Coming to your question, "simulating a brain" in a static manner would not make that simulation intelligent, but if you can "wire" it completely and let it evolve by itself, now we're entering a territory I have not spent enough time for thinking it through.

Oh, as I said "I don't know", an LLM doesn't know what it doesn't know, and can't self correct itself which are required capabilities for understanding something. It just generates something statistically viable via its network.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#186

Post by recursive »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #182
figers wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fair reply to an hour video, Scott is just so good to hear his talk is better than I can explain it... go to 24 minutes and 07 seconds. it's statistically determining what the next word should be based on all the text it's been trained on. It's not intelligence and he shows what probability it puts on each word that it chooses, but also shows a lot of the other words it was thinking of using. In a later part he shows…

> Human intelligence doesn't get confused like that. We do; this is the premise of many children's riddle-games, like the one that goes: "What is white and rhymes with silk? > Milk. What is cheese made from? > Milk. > What do cows drink?" At which point the riddle-guesser is very likely to answer "milk" even though the correct answer is "water".

I take issue with your "correct" answer.

Q: Why do cows produce milk?

A: Because calves (baby cows) drink it.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#188

Post by tshaddox »

wongarsu wrote: post #98
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.

We couldn't agree on what intelligence means before ChatGPT happened. Now, agreement on the term seems even further away If performing well on an IQ test or performing at a high level on knowledge work is intelligence to you, these models are intelligent. If intelligence requires sentience for you, then ... well, I don't think we really agree what that is either, never mind how to measure it. But LLMs certainly don't…

I don't think "intelligence" needs to carry all the intrigue and woo of related words like "consciousness" or "creative." If we just use "intelligence" to mean "the ability of a system to solve problems that are new to the system," that pretty much matches the dictionary definition and normal usage of the term. We don't need to touch messy questions like "is there something it's like to be a bat" to conclude that bats exhibit intelligence when they navigate long distances and hunt for food.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#189

Post by skolskoly »

renyicircle wrote: post #145
nozzlegear wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also, the 'before' segment didn't contain any mention of custard tarts, football, crowded trams, mixed feelings, etc. The original had a very positive travel agency type of tone, which was replaced with a lot of very odd sounding, imperative phrases that sound like engineering-speak. ('earn the fuss' 'build trips around pastry') I'm not convinced that this thing is actually meeting its design goal of not hallucinating shit.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#190

Post by bayindirh »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #157
bayindirh wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

No.

> 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.

With a big "if" attached to it. People were saying "computers will program themselves in the near future" for, checks notes, 24 years now, as far as I'm aware.

We're constantly building new knowledge and understanding things better than olden days. These models just compress our knowledge and light the blind corners we can't see well. I don't say they are useless, but I say that these things are overhyped.

All they can do is regurgitate human knowledge packed into them and highlight some long-distance correlations between items, which is useful in itself, but it can't jump to somewhere where it's not present its training data, but that's something humans and only humans can do.

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