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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#231

Post by rcxdude »

dwattttt wrote: post #230
rcxdude wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The google search bar is surprisingly smart sometimes. What's your definition of intelligence that completely excludes most of what a computer does?

Happily, I don't need to define "intelligence" here, because it's squarely in "I know it when I see it" territory. It's notoriously hard to define. I also don't ascribe intelligence to a pocket calculator.

I don't find it's particularly hard to define loosely, but then I don't think of it as a special property of humans other than it tends to be quite high in them. But we are obviously talking about different things and if you're not going to provide a definition then it's not really the basis for a productive conversation.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#232

Post by mythrwy »

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.

While being very capable, AI is missing something required for true intelligence and I struggle to explain exactly what it is I see missing.

It's not really "creativity" because much of that always was derivative in my opinion. And LLMs are (for some definition of the word) fairly creative as far as taking known elements and re-arranging them.

I think what is missing is sort of a world model building capability. As humans we see phenomenon and classify them informally and model "what would it look like if this were the cause of that?" type scenarios. We see qualities in phenomena and realize this applies to other things even though the things may be completely different. We run informal "thought experiments" sort of. This is hard to duplicate because a lot (most?) of it occurs outside of systems of symbols like math and language with fixed rules in my opinion.

Anyway yes, lots of human thinking is statistical and LLMs have that down pretty well but they are not "smart" I have concluded and it might be a very long time, if ever, until they are. That isn't to say they aren't very capable tools which they obviously are.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#233

Post by LtWorf »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #206
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…

> 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. I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesti…

> often capable of saying more interesting things than a lot of humans. Which says a lot about humans.

Other humans aren't there to entertain you, the LLM is.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#234

Post by [deleted] »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #219
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…

> ... including the "novel" math solutions, all of which appear to just be "a composition of solutions humans have developed and documented elsewhere" upon deeper inspection. But that is precisely what human mathematicians do, prove new theorems by combining ones proven earlier. I don't see any fundamental difference in functionality between human intellectual contributions vs performant ML ones (LLM or otherwise). W…

[deleted]

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#235

Post by _dain_ »

SamBam wrote: post #17
dofm wrote: post #5

Something that bothers me about AI generated content more broadly is how unmemorable it is. I don't mean as in bad . I mean literally, as in hard to remember or recall. Despite seeing a lot of them, I cannot think of one AI-generated photo that I can picture clearly in my mind; a few are partial but elusive. Whereas I can recall (visualise) a whole bunch of traditional photographs. The same is true of AI generated te…

I have this same idea about why it's hard to remember dreams, but even more so, why it's hard to remember my kid's or spouse's sleep-talking. Sometimes I'll check in on my sleeping kid and she'll sit up in bed and say some utter nonsense. I'll find it hilarious, giggle silently to myself, and kiss her goodnight again and she'll close her eyes and lie back. Why I try to tell her about her sleep-talking in the morning,…

The memories of dreams evaporate remarkably quickly. Much faster than anything else. It can't be accidental; I think our waking brains must be purging those memories as a matter of urgency. If we remembered them, we'd "learn" from them, which would be a catastrophe.

You know how you try to run in a dream, and you don't get anywhere? Imagine if your motor cortex started to expect that, when you're awake. It would destroy you.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#236

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

josefritzishere wrote: post #198
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You will have hard time to prove it isn’t. We have plenty of studies showing how bad platform providers are for you in every which way: focus, learning ability, reading level etc. And no, it is in no way like TV (although TV today tries its hardest to resemble social media content).

Point is, the technology itself is not harmful nor innocuous in itself, it is how we let these shitty corporations to guide and control how we use technology. AI is a useful tool, so is chat application with a friend list. So is a hammer. You don’t need to use any of them to smash your face in.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#237

Post by ben_w »

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…

> 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.

Not that I'm saying AI are like brains, but can you describe why brains, which are fundamentally slightly dodgy electrochemistry with frequent literal delusions of grander, are not "statistical"?

> 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 not easily be explained by "correlation engine", including the "novel" math solutions, all of which appear to just be "a composition of solutions humans have developed and documented elsewhere" upon deeper inspection.

Ditto, when do we humans do things exceeding the parameters of "correlation engine", especially if you consider compositing things either we or some other part of nature has developed and documented elsewhere to be insufficient?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#238

Post by ben_w »

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…

> 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 have it right now

Probably. Hopefully.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#239

Post by dgellow »

BobbyJo wrote: post #164
diego_sandoval wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I read AI-generated prose that is aimed at the general public, I have the exact same feeling. But when I ask Codex a technical question about coding, I don't get it at all. Codex replies to me in a very direct, technical manner, similar to the way I speak. When I ask ChatGPT to be concise and technical, I get the same effect. I think it's because prose aimed at the general public has to be very attention-baity -…

I use Claude and I find that it speaks in a very obfuscated manner when explaining things. It seems to make up jargon as it goes on top of spending a lot of tokens dancing around a point. I often find myself having to ask it to rephrase things, or speak directly about mechanism or consequence, in order to understand the point.

Not to accuse them of doing this, but AI vendors have an incentive to generate verbose responses, given that you pay per token

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#240

Post by ezoe »

People love to inflate their jobs if there is no cost.

I saw my ex-coworker tried to inflate text that can be expressed in couple of bullet points text. It doesn't add anything. It just fill the fancy flavour text that looks like professional. Then the reader of that inflated text is also another coworker in other team.

I said "Forget it and just send these bullet points" but he refused.

Bullshit job at it's finest I guess.

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