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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#301

Post by ddj231 »

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…

I see this line of reasoning quite a bit and it’s a strange one to me. The arguer reduces the sheer complexity of human intelligence and language by saying “we are just running statistical models in our brains” and by doing so makes the leap that Llms are intelligent. It’s an incredible simplification of the human person, who has a deep inner life, a soul, desires, and a will.

I don’t think the aversion to llms as intelligent has to do with the economics of paying intelligent agents more. I’d argue that it’s more fundamental than that. Humans are incredibly complex, and the world of sharing invisible things called knowledge, and the intelligent persons consuming such things which has been going on for thousands of years is far more rich than these synthetic outputs.

When it comes down to it the ai has no inner life, its is dead. A useful coding tool sure. But I wouldn’t call it intelligent.

One side example is just how bad these llms are at artistry. Just saying whatever should statically come next is not good art—and the outputs show it.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#302

Post by jay_kyburz »

williamcotton wrote: post #296
airstrike wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think airstrike is joking. :)

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#303

Post by masswerk »

futureshock wrote: post #292
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. T…

I prefer to think of this in terms of Umberto Eco's opera aperta (open work): if any text is a collaboration between author and reader/recipient, here, all the burden of meaning is left to the recipient. There's simply no meaning on the side of the "author", it's just a statistical extraction.

(There's also the problem of words/signs (just) referring to other words and/or cultural entities. There is no world nexus in this, therefore also nothing we conventionally refer to as meaning. On the other hand, it's utterly dogmatic, as all it refers to is the most probable construct, as a reference to references that are just another utterance, but supposedly a dominant one.)

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#304

Post by layla5alive »

dyla-ng wrote: post #263
rnd33 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Creating the model takes intelligence, but running it doesn’t. I think the point everybody’s revolving around is that the transformer model is an absurdly inefficient and low-fidelity approximation of a system that acts, observes consequences, and incorporates that feedback going forward. The issue isn’t really harness vs. no harness. IMO it’s about the lack of an internally generated sense of what to attend to. Yes,…

You're so close... And where is the magic "uncomputable spark" located inside of you? If you say analog thermodynamic noise - then ok, if we use true thermodynamic RNG for LLM activation function, will that meet the criteria? But what if super determinism is the law of the land? Then nobody is anything but computable from priors...

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#305

Post by akoboldfrying »

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.

> It hasn’t been passed

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

From the abstract: "When prompted to adopt a humanlike persona, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant. LLaMa-3.1, with the same prompt, was judged to be the human 56% of the time"

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#306

Post by jay_kyburz »

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…

>and just short-circuits to "there is no information here"

I feel the same way when I read a "press release" or anything written by marketing. Even the newspaper will only have 2-3 sentences of interesting information spread out over 4 paragraphs.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#307

Post by idiotsecant »

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…

Alright, take it easy. You typed a lot here but you're not actually saying much. LLMs produce useful outputs, their usefulness is just proportional to how well you know how to use them. Everything else is navel gazing.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#308

Post by treis »

kaeluka wrote: post #252
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.

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

This is a tell of LLMs but it's not universal. I use ChatGPT extensively and I don't often get obvious nonsense any more.

I'd figure out that it's an LLM because it's effectively superhuman. Taking that away I'm not so sure I'd be able to tell

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#309

Post by layla5alive »

bayindirh wrote: post #190
hombre_fatal wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

Locked in a dark room with no sensory organs, humans couldn't do that.

Most of what you said reads to me as denial.

An unconscious unintelligent but persistent trial and error process created us. We created LLMs. LLMs may create the next thing before we do - hard to say. They don't have all the cognitive tools we have yet, but they still outperform in some areas. As the cognitive playing field levels, I expect you will come to eat your words..

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#310

Post by idiotsecant »

codethief wrote: post #264
rcxdude wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese Room mainly just posits a room that passes the Turing Test, which LLMs do pretty well outside of outright adversarial situations.

Do they? https://longbets.org/1/ has yet to be settled. Either way, I doubt an LLM could fool anyone here who who knows how LLMs work into thinking it is human, at least not for an extended period of time (think about context length/compression, prompt injections, …).

You'll notice those goalposts are substantially stretched from the original test.
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