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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#191

Post by rockhymas »

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…

Abstraction is compression, and abstraction is definitely a core component of intelligence.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#192

Post by neom »

blakesterz wrote: post #4

"There's an ongoing discussion of whether humans are good at recognizing AI-generated text. While most research claims that humans don't really do a good job there, I disagree. " I wonder if humans that spend all day working in tech are good at recognizing AI-generated text, but people who spend all day doing jobs that don't involve computers aren't as good. And I wonder if those of us in tech are the only ones who r…

Most people do not realize when a personal message they receive was written by AI, study finds - https://theconversation.com/most-people-do-not-realize-when-...

People who frequently use ChatGPT for writing tasks are accurate and robust detectors of AI-generated text - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.15654

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#194

Post by fluoridation »

teekert wrote: post #176
fluoridation wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess they mean that intelligence is being able to hold models (compressed versions of reality) internally and use them to make predictions with a probability better than chance. That last part is the definition of information.

I find that highly questionable as a general description of what intelligence does. That's more like a description of a general knowledge base. When I think of someone intelligent, I think of someone who's able to draw unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated facts. In the broadest possible terms, I'd call it the ability to make abstractions and analogies. This is not just compression, but the ability to mentally operate on webs of meaning.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#195

Post by prophesi »

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'm guessing whether you believe it possesses intelligence or not depends on your answer to Searle's Chinese room thought experiment[0]. I'd also recommend checking out the Peter Watts' book, Blindsight.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#196

Post by ThrustVectoring »

chrisbrandow wrote: post #187

I've had the same trouble with AI tech docs, and I struggled to articulate it. There is something difficult about trying to point to the specific "problem" with a given document

The issue is not a localized part of any particular piece of prose, so being hard to articulate is unsurprising. Even the most egregious of LLMisms are little more than known-likely crutches that the statistics spit out in a sweet spot that gets noticed without being so frequent as to get RLHFed out of the model.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#197

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

recursive wrote: post #186
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yep, if the riddle asked "what do calves drink", then "milk" would definitely have been the correct answer.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#198

Post by josefritzishere »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #45
josefritzishere wrote: post #2

As people rely more on AI they experience cognitive atrophy. This is measurable in IQ loss, and other symptoms we might otherwise associate with early onset dementia or Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Well does anyone try to pretend doom scrolling make you smarter? I think platform companies have been successfully been turning people into morons for 20 years and now you don’t need to try even read a single news article or a blog post to learn how to solve a simple problem we are paving our way into intellectual (and literal) new dark ages. Perhaps we go back to feudal society when climate change crumbles the civil…

Doom scrolling is mindless entertainment, probably similar to the change from books to TV. It's not analogous to the loss of cognitive abilities we see with AI.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#199

Post by wrs »

My current theory is that this reflects a weakness in Claude’s ability to see the “big picture”.

When writing code, I have to explicitly tell it how to structure things at a high level, or the result is sort of a flattened spaghetti. Similarly, when it’s explaining things, it’s not good at pulling out unifying concepts and explaining top-down as a smart human would do. It groups little things together but often doesn’t generalize or synthesize explanatory connections from them.

I’ve been experimenting with explicitly working through a sequence of outputs at different levels of detail, but I haven’t found a consistently successful method.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#200

Post by skolskoly »

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 lot of it is hedging and using lots words to avoid saying something that isn't true. That way, it looks a lot like text that contains meaningful information, even though it doesn't. The speaker can pass the scrutiny of an informed audience, because they are able to substitute their knowledge into the words, as if by pareidolia. It's the sort of 'diplomatic' language you see from politicians, lawyers, students writing essays, and any other moderately intelligent person who is put in a position where they will face consequences for not answering. Behind all the fluff, there is a very loud voice yelling "I DON'T KNOW."
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