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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#351

Post by JSR_FDED »

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…

Another good example of AI making my brain do more work is when you ask it to compare two things:

“Compare a car and a bicycle”

The answer is invariably something like:

    Seats: 1 (bicycle) vs 4 (car)
    Tire width: 1 inch (bicycle) vs 12 inch (car)
    Steering: handlebar (bicycle) vs steering wheel (car)
Instead of “bikes are useful for short trips if the weather is ok and you like getting exercise, whereas a car is usually better for longer trips, bad weather, or multiple people”

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#352

Post by bambax »

OT, but I feel the title is wrong, or at least ambiguous. For the author, "AI blind" means they can't process text produced with AI. For me, "AI blind" rather means one can't see when something has been AI-generated.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#353

Post by lelanthran »

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.

The problem might be that it cannot backtrack. When AI generates output, there is no backspace key for it - it uses "No, but wait!" all over instead, which is very different to human output.

Subagents and/or branching conversations are presented as the solution to this - if you can't backtrack, then branch off a conversation to explore multiple paths (discarding the ones that didn't pan out), but this is a fix in the harness not a fix in the model. It's also literally how we made chess-playing engines back in the 80s: recursive path exploration with a fixed depth.

Humans don't exactly work that way either, AFAIK. So we have this uncanny valley of intelligence: it's some sort of intelligence, but not as we know it.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#354

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

tyromaniac wrote: post #170
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…

I've heard that expression before, but I don't think it can be presented and stated so matter of factly. Where does that put bzip?

There were experiments that zipped music pieces, I think, and then classified the compressed files by similarity. They got rather interesting resuls. But I do not remember much details. It was, I believe, about 20 years ago.

Asked Google: "Clustering by compression".

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#355

Post by xg15 »

demibabs wrote: post #253
ds_opseeker wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 regard…

This assumes "writing quality" were somehow an individual property of each word, and the writing quality of the entire text would just be that property for each word summed together.

Which is obviously not how it works.

> 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.

If I replace "pineapples" with "bananas" in any kind of meaningful text, I've not made the text "less precise", I made it plain wrong. An incorrect statement. And if the words next to it are still correct or even somehow replaced with even more correct words, the text in its entirety will still be wrong.

> It could do that regardless of watermarking since the model is probabilistic

No, because the probability distribution of the model is generated by its training data and contains semantic information. So the model choosing a completely incorrect word is unlikely. However the probability distribution of the red/green lists is not guided by semantic information.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#356

Post by cleandreams »

AI is missing the part of intelligence which involves insight. LLMs generate language blobs with highly sophisticated correlations. The governing insight in human cognition is essential to intelligence. It prunes the tree. It puts things in context. Everything is important to an LLM because insight intelligence is missing from the technology. The usefulness of LLMs doesn't tell us they are intelligent. It tells us how brilliant an invention language was.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#357

Post by jurgenburgen »

alchemism wrote: post #337
ddj231 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

I tend to think of it in reverse: not that LLMs are intelligent, but that humans are more empty than we…think we are.

I think that reveals your cynicism more than it provides any useful insight about intelligence.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#358

Post by jurgenburgen »

zoho_seni wrote: post #342
smohare wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt this entirely. It might be quite difficult for said human to discern whether a simple passage were generated sans such accumulated experience in reading AI text, true. But LLMs do not converse like humans in ways that have always been essentially immediately obvious.

Have you seen how many people talk to bots these days thinking is a real person. Or that are even in a relationship with them or friends.

Sometimes I wonder if LLMs are just revealing a section of the population with untreated mental illness or if LLMs are actively exacerbating mental illness.

We might eventually regret exposing the general population to such a new technology without almost any safeguards.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#359

Post by jurgenburgen »

treis wrote: post #308
kaeluka wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The ultimate tell is still the sycophancy. You agree with the suggestion output by the LLM but if it detects even a slight pushback it will completely reverse the previous suggestion. Only way to make it more obvious would be to have the LLM grovel and beg.

If these things have consciousness then we are committing sadism on a massive scale.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#360

Post by jaccola »

layla5alive wrote: post #300
jaccola wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is always the most silly argument. The original test was ambiguous but for sure the human was trying to prove themselves human.

So the first thing they’d do is tell me LLMs exist and the other thing is an LLM. Obviously a true human level ai could explain that away as a fabrication to trick me. I don’t think an LLM could do even this!

Turings whole point was that through the medium of text along if the human and machine were indistinguishable then that was true intelligence. So yes conversations of arbitrary length are allowed (needed).

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