What happens when people don't understand how AI works • Hacker News Board

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#111

Post by JKCalhoun » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:27 PM UTC

zephyr9 wrote: post #83

xyzal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, it's empathetic and caring. Which the LLMs will never be, unless you give money to OpenAI. Robots won't go get food for your sick, dying friend.

A robot could certainly be programmed to get food for a sick, dying friend (I mean, don't drones deliver Uber Eats?) but it will never understand why, or have a phenomenal experience of the act, or have a mental state of performing the act, or have the biological brain state of performing the act, or etc. etc.

Interesting. I wonder why?

Perhaps when we deliver food to our sick friend we subconsciously feel an "atta boy" from our parents who perhaps "trained" us in how to be kind when we were young selfish things.

Obviously if that's all it is we could of course "reinforce" this in AI.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#112

Post by lordnacho » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:27 PM UTC

intended wrote: post #87

lordnacho wrote: post #76

The article skirts around a central question: what defines humans? Specifically, intelligence and emotions? The entire article is saying "it looks kinds like a human in some ways, but people are being fooled!" You can't really say that without at least attempting the admittedly very deep question of what an authentic human is. To me, it's intelligent because I can't distinguish its output from a person's output, for…

This isn’t that hard, to be honest. And I’m not just saying this. One school of thought is - the output is indistinguishable from what a human would produce given these questions. Another school of thought is - the underlying process is not thinking in the sense that humans do it Both are true. For the lay person, calling it thinking leads to confusions. It creates intuitions that do not actually predict the behavior…

This is maybe the best response thus far. We can say that there's no real modelling capability inside these LLMs, and that thinking is the ability to build these models and generate predictions from them, reject wrong models, and so on.

But then we must come up with something other than opening up the LLM to look for the "model generating structure" or whatever you want to call it. There must be some sort of experiment that shows you externally that the thing doesn't behave like a modelling machine might.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#113

Post by shagie » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:29 PM UTC

dfxm12 wrote: post #98

krisoft wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds very wise but doesn’t seem to describe any of my use cases. Maybe some use cases are divination but it is a stretch to call all of them that. Just looking at my recent AI prompts: I was looking for the name of the small fibers which form a bird’s feather. ChatGPT told me they are called “barbs”. Then using straight forward google search i could verify that indeed that is the name of the thing i was lookin…

ChatGPT told me they are called “barbs”. Then using straight forward google search i could verify that indeed that is the name of the thing i was looking for. Why not just start with a straight forward Google search?

If you are not familiar with the term, it can be hard to search for it.

Google doesn't give you the answer (unless you're reading the AI summaries - then it's a question of which one you trust more). Instead it provides links to

    https://www.scienceofbirds.com/blog/the-parts-of-a-feather-and-how-feathers-work
    https://www.birdsoutsidemywindow.org/2010/07/02/anatomy-parts-of-a-feather/
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feather
    https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Feather-structure-a-feather-shaft-rachis-and-the-feather-vane-barbs-and-barbules_fig3_303095497

These then require an additional parsing of the text to see if it has what you are after. Arguably, one could read the Wiki article first and see if it has, but it's faster to ask ChatGPT and then verify - rather than search, scan, and parse.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#114

Post by Zak » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:30 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #97

kelseyfrog wrote: post #7

LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call i…

Maybe LLMs can be divinatory instruments but that sounds a bit highbrow going by my use. I use it more as a better Google search. Like the most recent thing I said to ChatGPT is "will clothianidin kill carpet beetles?" (turns out it does by the way.)

This seems like the sort of question that's very likely to produce a hallucinated answer.

Interestingly, I asked Perplexity the same thing and it said that clothianidin is not commonly recommended for carpet beetles, and suggested other insecticides and growth regulators. I had to ask a follow-up before it concluded clothianidin probably will kill carpet beetles.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#115

Post by fer » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:37 PM UTC

EMM_386 wrote: post #88

> These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not "understand" anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. This is terrible write-up, simply because it's the "Reddit Expert" phenomena but in print. They "understand" things. It depends on how your defining that. It doesn't have to be in its trai…

> More means more

You could have used "loool" vs "loooooool", "xDD" vs "xDDDDDDDDD", using flags doesn't change a whole lot.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#116

Post by stevenhuang » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:37 PM UTC

It is a logic error to think that knowing how something works means you are justified to say it can't possess qualities like intelligence or ability to reason when we don't even understand how these qualities arise in humans.

And even if we do know enough about our brains to say conclusively that it's not how LLMs work (predictive coding suggests the principles are more alike that not), it doesn't mean they're not reasoning or intelligent; it would just mean they would not be reasoning/intelligent like humans.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#117

Post by squidbeak » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:37 PM UTC

zephyr9 wrote: post #83

xyzal wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, it's empathetic and caring. Which the LLMs will never be, unless you give money to OpenAI. Robots won't go get food for your sick, dying friend.

A robot could certainly be programmed to get food for a sick, dying friend (I mean, don't drones deliver Uber Eats?) but it will never understand why, or have a phenomenal experience of the act, or have a mental state of performing the act, or have the biological brain state of performing the act, or etc. etc.

"Never" is a very broad word.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#118

Post by thoroughburro » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:37 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #97

kelseyfrog wrote: post #7

LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure. They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call i…

Maybe LLMs can be divinatory instruments but that sounds a bit highbrow going by my use. I use it more as a better Google search. Like the most recent thing I said to ChatGPT is "will clothianidin kill carpet beetles?" (turns out it does by the way.)

Trusting LLM advice about poisons seems… sort of like being a test pilot for a brand new aerospace company with no reputation for safety.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#119

Post by megaloblasto » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:38 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #33

meroes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya I don’t think I’ve seen any article going in depth into just how many low level humans like data labelers and RLHF’ers there are behind the scenes of these big models. It has to be millions of people worldwide.

I'm really curious to understand more about this. Right now there are top tier LLMs being produced by a bunch of different organizations: OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Meta and DeepSeek and Qwen and Mistral and xAI and several others as well. Are they all employing separate armies of labelers? Are they ripping off each other's output to avoid that expense? Or is there some other, less labor intensive mechanisms…

I'm also very interested in this. I wasn't aware of the extent of the effort of labelers. If someone could point me to an article or something where I could learn more that would be greatly appreciated.

Re: What happens when people don't understand how AI works

#120

Post by ramchip » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 12:41 PM UTC

dfxm12 wrote: post #98

krisoft wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds very wise but doesn’t seem to describe any of my use cases. Maybe some use cases are divination but it is a stretch to call all of them that. Just looking at my recent AI prompts: I was looking for the name of the small fibers which form a bird’s feather. ChatGPT told me they are called “barbs”. Then using straight forward google search i could verify that indeed that is the name of the thing i was lookin…

ChatGPT told me they are called “barbs”. Then using straight forward google search i could verify that indeed that is the name of the thing i was looking for. Why not just start with a straight forward Google search?

It gives you more effective search keywords. "Fibers in feathers" isn't too bad, but when it's quite vague like "that movie from the 70s where the guy drank whiskey and then there was a firefight and..." getting the name from the LLM makes it much faster to google.