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I'm becoming AI-blind

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451–460 of 533 posts

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#451
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It feels like it's getting better at that too. It will push back against obvious nonsense a lot stronger. But you are right that it holds opinions quite a bit less strenuously than humans.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#452

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…

At least in my mind, lack of substance was always the defining feature of slop. Stuff like "it's not just x, it's y" would be reasonable (if grating) tics from a human writer. Whereas humans are also capable of clever-sounding but substance-free writing, and it still sucks. AI just produced enough slop that we were forced to give it a name.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#453
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…

Yes AI content, even when correct and insightful, has a feeling of being disposable. Maybe it's because there is no person behind it.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#454
post #276

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...

[deleted]

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're conflating a discussion about current LLM capabilities with your fantasies about nonexistent future AI. LLMs act nothing like this, and the small example you're giving is only a small part of the things that LLMs can't do.

Not that I'm a professional mathematician, but I'm not seeing why people think definitions are somehow a blocker. LLMs have no issue making definitions (interfaces/traits/abstract classes) in programming, which is formally the same activity. I ask them to form a core "spine" of a program (basically an intelligible theory), and they do it really well.

Like when we had these recent counterexamples to various conjectures, it's then pretty obvious to say "okay why did that counterexample work when most examples people looked at didn't" or equivalently "characterize examples that work vs examples that don't". There's your definition. "Def: An 'evil' polynomial is one that... Thm: conjecture is true iff f is non-evil. Thm: f is evil iff f is dastardly and a menace. "

Or if you think it won't be able to come up with a sufficiently good name, just tell it to call the happy case normal, and it will be in good company with humans[0]. Sprinkle in some semi-, quasi-, pre-, and para- to cover the various different ways the thing might satisfy some but not all properties of being normal, and it'll fit right in. "A polynomial is of quasiprenormal Claude type if..."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal#Mathematics

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#457
post #7

That last image is bizarre. The quiche, cream and even the salad look like they've been given the trypophobia treatment. Which might even make sense, because there were always (still are?) those horrible ads in the chumbox area of news sites that used trypophobia and other creepy body-horror stuff to get you to click. [1] So maybe the hope is that you don't really look closely at the quiche, but some reptilian party…

I never understand why I can get better results, with less thinking about it, than some of the Tier1 companies.. Modern diffusion models can easily render the image onto a white background, center it, crop it, relight it, but keep the same item, at no cost, or low cost.

example: https://ordermerchants.com/static/img/clearshot/product-1.jp...

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention LLMs are dead and don't have the complexity or inner life that people do. Is your opinion that these kinds of things are not possible for AI in general, or that these things might be possible but we're just not there yet with modern LLMs? You mentioned LLMs don't have souls, desire, or a will. I imagine those latter two can be engineered, no?

> I imagine those latter two can be engineered, no? Ultimately yes, but not in modern AI systems.

I'm in the same boat, I think some aspects can be engineered, like intention and desire. I'm really curious if it's possible to go the full distance and make AI have experience like we do.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#459

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…

> 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 Isn't this how human brains work? We're just large probabilistic neural inference machines. A network of neural weights guided by past training. To be honest I think the debate about what "sentience" is is inconsequential n…

As will be obvious when an alien intelligence makes itself known.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously. My point is that it's already not all that unreasonable, which you notably didn't address.

I think it has very little to do with reasoning and much more with psychological inertia or pattern matching.

If I trick you into answering a question correctly, that doesn't make you wrong. Even if I suspect you did it for the wrong reason.
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