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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#321

Post by airstrike »

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.

"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

— Bertrand Russell.

I'm not calling you to action, I'm explaining why I don't feel inclined to engage in philosophy and discuss "the concrete outcomes of intelligence" given a more pressing, pragmatic need.

It feel it's self-evident that we must fight the good fight of dissuading as many people as possible of the notion that LLMs as we have today, and likely forever after, are actually intelligent. Delaying this fight allows the current, stupid belief to the contrary to fester.

I don't think we'll win the majority of people over by debating the nuanced meaning of the word intelligence to a very precise degree.

I think we ought to do it by shaming them every time LLMs fail.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#322

Post by airstrike »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #302
williamcotton wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

I appreciate the charitable interpretation but I was not even joking this time! :)

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#323

Post by AdieuToLogic »

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…

> Something is deeply wrong with AI generated output, and I say this as someone who is typically very impressed by AI.

It is because GenAI output has no thought behind it, as you identified in your previous paragraph:

> 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.

You are searching for meaning in something which was not created to convey meaning. The text was, instead, the result of an extremely clever statistically based algorithm.

Not contemplation. Not thought.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#324

Post by cPc_bot »

sa-code wrote: post #138
PaulHoule wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of it the effect of tells. “It’s not X, it’s Y” is not a bad pattern but it was baked into the instruction following training set just like the other patterns. I catch myself about to use it and use something else because I want to look human. I have, a few times, tried to use AI to write something that I was struggling to find the words and I just didn’t like how it didn’t seem like my voice. If there was just…

Someone shared with me this system prompt that at least makes assistant outputs usable For information retrieval tasks, I want you to provide links to sources and use exact quotes as much as possible. When using a source, consider if it is primary or secondary information. If secondary sources are found, search again for primary sources. Sources and quotes, if applicable, should be mentioned in the answer first befor…

[flagged]

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#325

Post by davidgh »

andrewflnr wrote: post #179
davidgh wrote: post #43

My son is currently learning Romanian and I was trying to help him with verbs. I don’t know Romanian but recalled when learning a foreign language for the first time it really helped me to break down how a verb form or tense worked in English, then learn the equivalent in the new language. So I wanted to make some charts and pages that he could use as learning resources. I used Claude to help. I don’t know how to qui…

> It’s almost like a pseudo-language where it has the correct form and presentation but is missing critical components. Slop. The word is slop. Has been for years now. I mean, is this not exactly what we've all been talking about the whole time?

I mean, yes - but somehow this feels like a different category. At least to me. I view slop as the classic garbage like:

[Thing] isn’t just [X]—it’s [more dramatic Y]. And [short validating statement].

I can see and smell this type of slop from a mile away. What I’m referring to is in the same family as slop but somehow different - it fools my brain by putting on the presentation of credibility and thus it is even worse. I can skip right over classic slop without much effort. This kind of text tricks me into laboring over it before I realize it’s hollow.

So in that way, it’s worse than slop.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#326

Post by jay_kyburz »

airstrike wrote: post #322
jay_kyburz wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think airstrike is joking. :)

I appreciate the charitable interpretation but I was not even joking this time! :)

Oh, in that case I agree strongly with William. I think the definition of intelligence a complete waste of time and the only real question is, can these tool solve problems for us? The answer is clearly yes, there are some problems they can.

The really interesting question is still a few years away when we ask if we humans have the right to turn these things on and off? ;)

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#327

Post by AdieuToLogic »

Prompt an AI with:

  What is the best chicken noodle soup I can make?
And you will get at least one recipe which surely is tasty.

Ask a person the same question and you might be told:

  One you make for someone you love.
This is the difference between a statistically probable response and understanding.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#328

Post by oasisaimlessly »

layla5alive wrote: post #304
dyla-ng wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Please don't use double-quotes when you're not directly quoting someone.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#329

Post by manwe150 »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #281
mik1998 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New and interesting mathematics is done by inventing new definitions and fields, not just combining old theorems to prove new ones.

It's not that different, when a human proposes a better definition vis-a-vis a competing one for example, they would defend this by certain desiderata. Often a mathematician or physicist will use their intuition to speed up the naive brute force of candidate well formed formula variations so that the desired properties emerge, postulating the existence of an intersection on multiple desiderata can in itself be viewed…

I think the parent meant it is more interesting to pose new problems than solve them. Posing a new conjecture along the path to solving something is a close cousin, but still seems more bounded than proposing something novel to prove—if only because proving that something novel is also actually interesting is subjective and thus difficult for a different reason.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#330

Post by jwrallie »

I don't care if it is AI is involved or not, but I care how much attention and thought there was behind the final text (or code) from the human behind it, and it shows.
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