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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#251

Post by quickthrowman »

dofm wrote: post #26
bobajeff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand I'm still trying to forget the weird thing happening with this one guys eyes in a WickedAI video I was only able to watch half of.

I remember seeing some very strange, deliberately creepy images that were generated to accompany a two-paragraph creepypasta about a 19th Century Belgian expedition into the jungle. They were actually rather good in a sort of "fake collodion image" sense, and the eerie early-DALL-E quality to them really helped the spookiness. But I can only remember this technicality and the feelings with any clarity, not any of the…

> I remember seeing some very strange, deliberately creepy images that were generated to accompany a two-paragraph creepypasta about a 19th Century Belgian expedition into the jungle.

I can’t think of anything more unsettling than the actual events that took place in the Belgian run Congo Free State in the late 19th and early 20th century. The Wikipedia article is scarier than any creepypasta you could write in that setting.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#252

Post by kaeluka »

setopt wrote: post #222
wongarsu wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But the consistent trend of the last couple decades (arguably since Turing's time) seems to be that any time a computer reaches our definition of intelligence we decide that that was a flawed definition I do recall a couple of decades ago, when the Turing test was discussed as the big goal that seemed so far away. Then LLMs arguably did pass the test, and no one cared about the test anymore.

I thought the same then. But the funny thing is that today, it has become a lot easier to recognize the frontier models as not human. All the load bearing and not x but y, etc… weird

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#253

Post by demibabs »

ds_opseeker wrote: post #126
demibabs wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watermarking doesn’t affect writing quality (on average) as long as the implementation is correct.

Love your "on average" qualification. Like the cartoon where the water temperature is fine on average, with one bucket boiling and the other ice. The interesting question is how to define 'average'. Over what probability distribution? Hey, anyone remember this from earlier in the week? https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text...

The qualifier is there because it changes the outputs, so it’s necessarily true that some outputs will be worse.

But it’s just as likely to make an output better.

Take the example from the article. He complains that watermarking might sometimes, for example, choose to say “bananas” over “pineapples” because only the former is on the green list, potentially making an output less precise. But 1. It could do that regardless of watermarking since the model is probabilistic, and 2. The more accurate word choice of “pineapples” is equally likely to be on the green list instead, further increasing its likelihood!

Overall, the article is pretty silly because he’s complaining about the possibility of Claude not always choosing the most “optimal” token, even though LLMs are probabilistic so that will happen anyways.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#254

Post by peder »

resonious wrote: post #217
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…

Why is being statistics/algorithms wrong? What's wrong with that? The "A" means artificial so none of this seems surprising or weird or bad.

[dead]

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#255

Post by tharkun__ »

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…

I see what you did there with the —s!

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#256

Post by jaccola »

setopt wrote: post #222
wongarsu wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But the consistent trend of the last couple decades (arguably since Turing's time) seems to be that any time a computer reaches our definition of intelligence we decide that that was a flawed definition I do recall a couple of decades ago, when the Turing test was discussed as the big goal that seemed so far away. Then LLMs arguably did pass the test, and no one cared about the test anymore.

It hasn’t been passed and no one cares about it because it’s basically an end goal. No lab can hit it so they can’t juice the crazy Turing benchmark 3000 for marketing.

If someone sat me down today with an LLM and a human and both were trying to prove to me they were human, and I can have conversations of arbitrary length, I’d get it right every time.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#257

Post by buzzin__ »

bayindirh wrote: post #185
pyridines wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your text reads much better if you replace word 'intelligence' with 'text generator with some randomness built in'.

This is because you goal is to state how models are not intelligent, but you couldn't attack the generated text itself, so you created a little rider, attached it to the model, and then you attacked the raider.

But, even in that you failed. You compared the source of human randomness in text generation, and called it 'profound' and implied that it is exactly the source of true intelligence. But, then, the temperature, the similar thing in model was "just a randomness slider". Double standard.

A logical fallacy free attack on LLMs would be to show a prompt, and then the response generated by this prompt, where it would be shown that only an entity with no intelligence would generate such a response. Yet, attacks like this are not written here anymore.

I wonder why.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#258

Post by tlkn_bot_praxis »

I've been stuck in loop all week where a coworker asked me to review some methodology documents that are clearly generated by Claude (which is fine in this case) but every time I sit down my brain can't get through 2 sentences without feeling like I'm reading nothing. It actually feels like the content, which isn't empty, has no meaning. So I go on to another assignment and come back later and the same thing happens. And now I have anxiety about opening it so it has compounded in difficulty haha. Glad other people are experiencing this.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#259

Post by ImaCake »

It can be helpful to read LLM text the same way you read technical fluff - start from the assumption its mostly garbage with a core technical point. I find skim reading the output to find the useful bit reduces the friction.

When I ask ChatGPT questions I usually only read paragraphs 2 and 3. The first paragraph is glazing me, anything after paragraph 3 is repeating what was said earlier.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#260

Post by mw888 »

There's an amortization aspect as well.

If I'm going to be iterating on one document or idea in an extended manner with feedback from the chatbot, I will make an effort to setup the decorum it should follow, because it's a small proportion of the time in that chat.

But the guy just trying to get a report or email out quickly? Not so much.

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