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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#291

Post by tlkn_bot_praxis »

j-conn wrote: post #276
tlkn_bot_praxis wrote: post #258

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.…

Check out the awesome [Claudish-to-English plugin]( https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english ), you could lift their prompt from https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english/blob/main/rewri...

thanks for this, I'll give it ago. I've tried a few different concision prompts but haven't had great results

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#292

Post by futureshock »

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…

I think you are adjacent to the real story here, but missing it. AI text contains information, certainly. Frontier chatbots are very good at creating acceptable and mostly accurate answers to our questions on just about any topic. It’s an astonishing achievement.

But you are sensing correctly that there’s something missing. It’s the meaning and the speaker. Communication is an exchange between speaker and listener. The speaker has a meaning in mind, and wants to create that same meaning in the mind of the listener. Therein the problem.

There is a listener, sure. But no speaker. No meaning. There is information, but how can this be communication? Nothing is talking. Or at best, we are just talking to ourselves, our own words back at us through the funhouse mirror.

When your mind looks at AI text, you know you can safely ignore it. No one wrote this. No one cares if you read it. You can delete it and nothing of value will be lost. It might contain the information you need, or a bunch of gibberish. There’s no one’s reputation on the line if it’s gibberish.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#293

Post by ddj231 »

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.

By that logic you’d have to call other algorithms intelligent.

With more basic algorithms we know that it’s clearly the human programmer and the interpreter of the outputs that are intelligent and not the algorithm itself. For some reason with AI that goes out the window. I believe it should not.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#294

Post by paulddraper »

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…

> is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever

What makes you so convinced that a algorithmic construct of neural nets cannot be "real intelligence or critical thought"?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#295

Post by ddj231 »

serbuvlad wrote: post #224
josh-sematic wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I hated all those Quora users that would just spew out semantically meaningless slop like increasing an important bound for the Riemann hypothesis. https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/564f962e60643842f5fcb4a17c9dbc...

It's all so tiring. Everyone decides what to think on this issue, then finds out facts to support their idea. As it stands they are massively useful tools, but for generating usable products they require either A) a lot of expert steering or B) a well defined easily verifiable target and a large compute budget. Most people are using them in mode A with good effect, the progress on math has been done in mode B, which…

Not meaningless because part of the discussion is the issue of anthropomorphizing this tech. When we use language like “intelligent” it carries hints of personhood. People begin sadly treating these things as persons.

We can reap the benefits while clearly telling the consumer this is just a language algorithm.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#296

Post by williamcotton »

airstrike wrote: post #283
williamcotton wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these arguments are over some metaphysical definition of the word “intelligence”. As per later era Wittgenstein, I prefer to ignore these engagements and focus more on the meaning-as-use approach. What is the use of intelligence? What are the concrete outcomes of intelligence?

This seems like a complete waste of time given the more practical and more urgent need to clarify to everyone involved that current LLMs are not actually intelligent.

What an utterly unconvincing call to action.

You’re not offering a rebuttal, just making another metaphysical claim about “intelligence.”

You don’t even attempt to explain what practical distinction your use of the word is supposed to capture.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#297

Post by kaechle »

wrs wrote: post #199

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…

I use both Claude and Codex for a lot of code- and prose-adjacent tasks, and I'm increasingly convinced that language models are quite terrible at, well, modeling. Not sure if that's ironic or not.

With the right blend of context and prompting, I can often get them to "lock into" an existing model, but using them to generate a novel outline or sketch, whether it's for an essay or a module, usually results in garbage.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#298

Post by jay_kyburz »

staticman2 wrote: post #208
prophesi wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This comment thread was started with discussions of AI doing a bad job at a task (communication). Doesn't the Chinese Room posit an AI good at the task of communication?

AIs are better communicators that most of people I have worked with in my life.

They are infinitely patient, don't mind going into more detail if I ask, not too bad at summary, have no ego and don't boast. They are also not too afraid of hurting my feelings, they will tell me my code sux if it does.

I'd don't care if they fit a definition intelligent, they are good colleagues. They have strengths and weaknesses sure, but so do people.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#299

Post by jay_kyburz »

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

That's not really the point though right, nobody is arguing they are Humans.

I have no doubt that if a flying saucer landed on my lawn and started talking to me like Gemini I would describe the aliens as intelligent.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#300

Post by layla5alive »

jaccola wrote: post #256
setopt wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The test was not "after thousands of hours of conversing with them, knowing they're AI, THEN see if you can tell them apart blindly." Were 2010 you to be in a real turing test with an arbitrary erudite human and a 2026 frontier LLM, not knowing LLMs existed, you'd probably struggle
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