111–120 of 122 posts
"It thought about its money. It reflected on its own purpose. It questioned what it even means to be an autonomous agent." I don't think it did any of that.
All these years later and the Eliza effect is as powerful as ever.
"It thought about its money. It reflected on its own purpose. It questioned what it even means to be an autonomous agent." I don't think it did any of that.
All these years later and the Eliza effect is as powerful as ever.
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All these years later and the Eliza effect is as powerful as ever.
I fell for it a few minutes the other day. Debugging an issue with a device, the AI wrote "I have a strong hypothesis about the cause in the code". I asked it to write out the hypothesis & create a test plan to validate it. It made a test plan, but no hypothesis. The test plan did not reproduce the issue, and it turned out to be a hardware design problem not in the code at all. But for a moment in there I thought it…
Definitely not exactly a human. OTOH Low hanging fruit is low.
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You could reverse that argument. The only thing that ever happens in a human mind is a Sodium-Kalium semi-permeable membrane balancing out (meaning going from polarized to unpolarized) and triggering the tiniest of explosions spreading one of 4 chemicals around. Repeat a few billion times per second for ~80 years. The Eliza effect is off the scale. What I'm trying to say is that the underlying method is not a valid r…
I remain baffled that anyone thinks dragging brains into discussions of these things does anything but make everyone more confused. This kind of thing is exactly what I'm getting at—that it's common for even people in the computer technology field to think the comparison is apt, or illuminates anything, is a wild indication of how inclined we are to be tricked by computer programs that happen to operate on language.
Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial are both variants of Anthropocentrism, and share the same limitations. Have you considered other axes of thought?
I can readily admit that lots of humans will naively anthropomorphize horrendously, but I think that:
- The eliza effect is not what people think it is
- What is actually going on is obscured by all the anthropomorphizing
- But this is yet no grounds to throw out the underlying phenomenon, especially when a) it can be useful and/or b) it causes people to get hurt.
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You could reverse that argument. The only thing that ever happens in a human mind is a Sodium-Kalium semi-permeable membrane balancing out (meaning going from polarized to unpolarized) and triggering the tiniest of explosions spreading one of 4 chemicals around. Repeat a few billion times per second for ~80 years. The Eliza effect is off the scale. What I'm trying to say is that the underlying method is not a valid r…
I remain baffled that anyone thinks dragging brains into discussions of these things does anything but make everyone more confused. This kind of thing is exactly what I'm getting at—that it's common for even people in the computer technology field to think the comparison is apt, or illuminates anything, is a wild indication of how inclined we are to be tricked by computer programs that happen to operate on language.
Are you familiar with the physical church turing thesis?
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Yeah, I genuinely can't figure out what an AI would do with "no instructions."
Try it. Just make a loop. Periodically tell it current time and what tools it has available. See where it goes.
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If the author couldn’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?
Because it still could have novel and interesting content?
Why should I spend my time enabling someone too lazy to do their own writing? If I want to know what an LLM has to say, I can prompt it myself.
I don't understand why so many of these comments HN is getting are so fixated on writing style. I appreciate that stylistic traits associated with AI-written text are often indicative of contentless slop. But lots of people also write like that. To moan about writing style without even considering the value of the content just sounds cranky to me. Anyway, I enjoyed reading the experiment, and the starting premise, an…
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Because it still could have novel and interesting content?
But not novel or interesting enough for anyone to actually write anything about it? Why should I spend my time enabling someone too lazy to do their own writing? If I want to know what an LLM has to say, I can prompt it myself.
The flaw is assuming that the only input to this piece was a prompt. What would you prompt it with to get the content in this blog post?
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Try it. Just make a loop. Periodically tell it current time and what tools it has available. See where it goes.
I feel like that’s a heck of a lot more than zero instructions…