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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#381

Post by fyredge »

davidgh wrote: post #325
andrewflnr wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wo…

Technically, it's still slop. The first example is just slop that you recognise as slop. For reference, see gell-mann amnesia.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#382

Post by himata4113 »

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…

Don't discount the capability of representing human-like intelligence with simple constructs. Give enough parameters and advanced enough training you can without a doubt create real intelligence. We've seen some of this already with "j-space" where llms have started to exhibit reasoning before it ever reaches the output head.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#383

Post by type0 »

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.

LLM is a probabilistic moron machine, it's virtually undistinguishable from a non-probabilistic human moron

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#384

Post by xigoi »

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.

The statistical nature means that what an AI produces is basically the average across all training data, making the generated text extremely bland and personality-less.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#385

Post by serbuvlad »

ddj231 wrote: post #295
serbuvlad wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personhood is poorly defined.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#386

Post by xboxnolifes »

SoftTalker wrote: post #69
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…

Do you have much exposure to pre-AI corporate memos, mission statements, marketing plans, or white papers? Because they were mostly written in that style. Full of buzzwords, cliche similes, platitudes, jargon and stock phrases.

I also read right through those. 90% of most companies' webpages is drivel. Same with 90% of a job listing's text. I hardly understand how people get any meaningful information from corporate websites, they're all just "enhancing your business outcomes by incorporating technical excellence with synergistic AI" or something like that.

There's somehow less information than if they just asked claude to make something up without any context.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#387

Post by fallinditch »

There is another aspect to this that I find even worse than LLM writing style: badly-human-written documents and posts.

You know this: you read something and it's like 'here's a mass of poorly structured text, it's not clear what the points are, it reads ugly, I have to read to the end to discover that there are no points! Or if there are points i now have to reread it. What a lot of effort.'

LLMs have annoying grammatical tics and can have other problems too, like the author says, but sometimes they can help to take bad writing and make it clear and more digestible.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#388

Post by anonzzzies »

I just throw it in AI; if it’s tech docs, I tell it to build whatever is there, if it’s something else I tell it to give me max 5 points to tell me the meat of it. Either way, I will never read it myself. This works well for tech docs/apis really; it usually gets it to work fine without me checking, even though the docs are usually subtly wrong in many places; after that I can read working code and that works a lot better for my brain.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#389

Post by customguy »

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.

So? The people who can do it prove it can be done - the people who can't don't prove the opposite. Might as well claim all math is wrong because most people don't understand it.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#390

Post by akoboldfrying »

jaccola wrote: post #364
akoboldfrying wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

Low n, time bound, not reproduced. And look at their example conversations… And people forget that sometimes humans message twice. An LLM can only respond. So it immediately fails here in a true Turing test. (You could loop the LLM but then I expect even more immediately obvious bot behaviour).

> Low n

Are you serious? From the paper:

> We recruited 126 participants from the UCSD psychology undergraduate subject pool and 158 participants from Prolific (Prolific, 2025).

Each human participated in 8 rounds.

> time bound

The time bound of 5 minutes was suggested by Turing himself in his original paper.

> not reproduced

It was reproduced across two populations within the paper.

> And look at their example conversations

This is irrelevant.

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