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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#501

Post by prophesi »

rcxdude wrote: post #499
prophesi wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all comes down to semantics. And yeah, with the thought experiment, Searle presents three axioms of what could constitute intelligence. Then proposes the chinese room thought experiment as an approval of his third rule, "Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics." Which only makes sense when you take the other two rules together. Oddly enough, defining intelligence with our capabilit…

The thing is it doesn't really need creative counter-arguments, it's basically just assuming its conclusion. If you disagree with the conclusion, the argument is nonsense because Searle is just saying 'well the man doesn't understand, so nothing does', and if you agree with the conclusion you don't really need to jump through any hoops to get to it, the third rule is just obviously following from the first and second…

Is that not one of the counter-arguments? You're disagreeing of what Searle determines to be "intelligence." We don't understand how consciousness works, what it's like to be a bat, or how this emergent property came to be. It's why it's necessary to define the terms, then prove them wrong or right. If you disagree with the definitions, that's fine. There is no agreement on what constitutes intelligence.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#502

Post by JC5 »

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…

You're giving your model instructions that it's literally incapable of understanding. A random word selection lottery machine will never do anything meaningful to determine if a source is primary or secondary.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#503

Post by eloisius »

wongarsu wrote: post #98
pyridines wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't accept that it possesses no intelligence. It is not equivalent to human intelligence, obviously, but how can a system without some semblance of rational thinking solve open math problems? Even composing earlier human work into something novel requires intelligence and understanding on some level.

We couldn't agree on what intelligence means before ChatGPT happened. Now, agreement on the term seems even further away If performing well on an IQ test or performing at a high level on knowledge work is intelligence to you, these models are intelligent. If intelligence requires sentience for you, then ... well, I don't think we really agree what that is either, never mind how to measure it. But LLMs certainly don't…

> 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 think the mistake here is the notion that there was a definition of intelligence. Or at least a consensus on that definition. Just because compsci nerds of the day thought the Turing test was the final threshold before “real” AI, doesn’t mean philosophers, psychologists and everyone else bought into it. And when we arrived and it turns out to be underwhelming it’s because the compsci nerds made the same mistake they always make: that their models truly encompass all the dense complexity of the real world.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#504

Post by eloisius »

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.

Have you seen how many people form one-sided bonds with stars that don’t know they exist? Lonely people suspend disbelief to find some comfort. It’s not proof that the chatbot is indistinguishable from a human companion.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#505

Post by jxramos »

JC5 wrote: post #502
sa-code wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're giving your model instructions that it's literally incapable of understanding. A random word selection lottery machine will never do anything meaningful to determine if a source is primary or secondary.

It is admittedly awkward to bend to the machine to get what you want. I see these kinds of constraints like given above as an impetus to push the LLM designers to rise to the occasion, assuming they’re listening to all the prompts funneling back their way. This may all be wishful thinking however but hopefully someday these kinds of prompt constraints will be satisfied.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#506

Post by dsign »

Frieren wrote: post #478
dsign wrote: post #52

I don't like AI-generated text at work, at all. It feels lifeless and unfocused. But what I hate the most is that it is objectively better than what I had before. No typos, clear structure, and, regrettably, the verbosity and autistic obsession with detail of the LLM is more actionable and useful than the human guy who wrote lists of commands and URLs as documentation, without explaining anything. Or the colleague wh…

> ... and autistic obsession with detail ... Why do people glorify autism? I have seen this mostly on CEOs that want workers that are hyper-focused, intelligent and do not complain. The ideal employee from which extract value and a minimum cost. I have worked with autistic people (diagnosed ones). And it is a struggle. One of them could be the nicest most reasonable person one minute and then get a trigger and become…

> > The cynic in me bemoans that we brought this upon ourselves, in more than one way.

> I enjoy working with other employees and people need human contact to become fully self-actualized. Isolating people to maximize productivity misses the point and brings no more productivity and just avoids fixing any real existing problems.

While I share the feeling and the posture, I haven't managed yet to use them for better documentation. In fact, for me enjoying human contact takes precedence to pressing people--however politely--into writing better docs, specially now that we have LLMs. The skill of writing should be taught and nurtured in school, and if you made it to the workplace without it, then maybe it's too late and you are better off using an LLM to assist you. Which is exactly what I bemoan.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#507

Post by rcxdude »

prophesi wrote: post #501
rcxdude wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is it doesn't really need creative counter-arguments, it's basically just assuming its conclusion. If you disagree with the conclusion, the argument is nonsense because Searle is just saying 'well the man doesn't understand, so nothing does', and if you agree with the conclusion you don't really need to jump through any hoops to get to it, the third rule is just obviously following from the first and second…

Is that not one of the counter-arguments? You're disagreeing of what Searle determines to be "intelligence." We don't understand how consciousness works, what it's like to be a bat, or how this emergent property came to be. It's why it's necessary to define the terms, then prove them wrong or right. If you disagree with the definitions, that's fine. There is no agreement on what constitutes intelligence.

Again, you keep mentioning intelligence but you talk more like you're talking about awareness/'understanding'/semantics. I agree that these are tricky things to define precisely but there is a reason they are different words. It's also odd considering you mentioned 'blindsight' which is a whole book about the idea that you could have intelligence but not awareness (something I am not sure is a coherent concept, personally).

And yeah, part of it does seem to stem from disagreement about definitions. To me Searle seems to assume much more in his definitions as obvious than he explicitly states, which is why the Chinese room seems like such a non-argument from my point of view.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#508

Post by aakresearch »

cpeterso wrote: post #140
moritzwarhier wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets worse with language mixing, but I can't help from finding it funny at times, unless it bites me.

Yes, I've had both ChatGPT and Perplexity return English answers with Hindi words sprinkled in (for totally unrelated queries). For example, I asked ChatGPT to summarize a long news story and it substituted the Hindi equivalent हत्या for the word "murder", as if ChatGPT was trying to work around alignment training or keyword block lists that discourage it from using the word "murder".

I've had Gemini CLI (the coding agent!) smuggling in Chinese words in the output - completely unexpectedly, I do not speak and never discussed anything Chinese with it. Copilot was mixing in Cyrillic character, unprovoked - take "обligation", for example. And so did Grok, when discussing Russian anecdotes - "KRЯК". Very helpful reminder to not anthropomorphise them machines.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#509

Post by theshrike79 »

Nathanba wrote: post #438
el_benhameen wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really good description of the problem. I’ve been trying to use Claude to get familiar with the mechanics of a new codebase, and there have been so many moments where I’ve stopped after reading the same paragraph five times in a row and thought “Am I tired? Or stupid? Or is this codebase just wildly more complex than anything I’ve seen before?” before realizing that it’s just taken English and smushed it ar…

It's a Claude problem, chatgpt is about x10 better and it's quite rare that I'm getting such foggy vague texts that I have to reread to understand. Chatgpt used to have the same problem in the early days but even then it was less pronounced than how it is in Claude today. Fable is a bit better but not as good as Chatgpt.

It swapped at the Opus/Fable 5 and Sol developments.

Opus 5 uses such convoluted language that it takes me multiple seconds to parse it. I specifically have to instruct it to use some kind of sane language (Caveman the AE STD English hack or something) to make it understandable.

Before that it used to be GPT that used 500 words when 5 would do. The ChatGPT version still does, but Codex is a lot better now.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#510

Post by red75prime »

mythrwy wrote: post #436
red75prime wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However LLMs deal entirely in symbols. They use tokens as input/output encoding. They do 99.9999% of processing in a high-dimensional latent space.

How exactly is this high dimensional latent space represented? Pixie dust and ethereal forces? Or floating point numbers? Where does it get the weights? Reddit? Do you hold your experience of "dogs" (for instance) as floating point numbers? The fur, the fear, the love, the wet mouths, the sounds and colors?

Do you experience dogs as lots of action potentials traveling along axons and lots of neurons doing their thing in your brain?

I don't know how it gets from the physical processes or the information processing to our first-hand experiences. So, I can't be sure that a bunch of high-dimensional vectors can't lead to experiences.

Regardless, the claim "LLMs deal entirely in symbols" is wrong as a matter of fact.

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