Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 207 posts

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#111

Post by bigstrat2003 »

hammock wrote: post #74
IshKebab wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of agree with you... The trouble is your logic is trivially obviously nonsense. "Word calculator", "linear algebra"... This is just a variation on it's just a stochastic parrot / it's just a next token predictor. The implication is that because it is "just" this simple-sounding thing, it can't be a complex thing! Except we know empirically that that doesn't hold. What are humans if not "just" next action predi…

I agree, eventually, but LLMs aren’t there quite yet. There are what, maybe 10 million distinct agents in the wild today? 100 million or a billion if we’re being charitable. At the time being, the vast vast majority of those agents are all trained on the same or similar training set (the Internet and books). Which makes them mostly all the same. Vastly less diverse than the way one complex lifeform hatches out of the…

They aren't even close to there. There isn't a shred of intelligence in an LLM, let alone sentience.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#112

Post by TZubiri »

jjk166 wrote: post #64

"If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." -Socrates

There's this fallacy where one defends a modern idea by citing criticism to an old idea, thus positioning their modern idea as revolutionary as the classical one that survived the filter of time.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#113

Post by ragequittah »

grebc wrote: post #104
ragequittah wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just find it such a fascinating technology. It's finally fun to be a nerd again! For me it's the same feeling as when I was on the internet in the early '90s and was trying to tell people how useful it would be. I don't hold a grudge against anybody who held out until the iPhone came around or whatever it was that got them to finally realize the usefulness, but I still question why it was so hard to convince so man…

You can find something interesting without brow-beating people about it.

You can also find something uninteresting without brow-beating people about it. Goes both ways. Just giving my experience with it, take it or leave it. The comment I was replying to seemed to wonder why people didn't understand non-engagement with the tech, I gave my reasoning. The cost of engaging is also so slim (and it's freaking everywhere) that it has to be an almost religious aversion to not, which I find quite perplexing in itself.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#115

Post by bigstrat2003 »

ragequittah wrote: post #81
dspillett wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And like a cult to those of us preferring not to engage, for whatever reason, with everyone and their dog telling us that we should (and sometimes getting quite offended, like our refusal to play that game is a personal attack on them for choosing to).

I just find it such a fascinating technology. It's finally fun to be a nerd again! For me it's the same feeling as when I was on the internet in the early '90s and was trying to tell people how useful it would be. I don't hold a grudge against anybody who held out until the iPhone came around or whatever it was that got them to finally realize the usefulness, but I still question why it was so hard to convince so man…

> It's finally fun to be a nerd again!

I genuinely cannot understand how you can possibly find fun in LLMs. They are poor tools that can't do the things they are claimed to be able to do, they are being shoved down the throat of the entire industry by massive FOMO, and if they ever can actually live up to the hype it's clear that we will all (every human, not just programmers) be out of jobs as the oligarchs replace us with machines who don't get tired or require a cut of the money. So they are either useless toys, or the most dystopian thing the tech industry has ever created. Where, exactly, is the fun in either of those outcomes?

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#116

Post by TZubiri »

I too have glossed over the actual meat of the article and wish to comment with a generic ProAI/AntiAI comment based on the general gist derived from the title, (or the synopsis if I'm a deep scholar that likes to do deep dives)

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#117

Post by beloch »

Murfalo wrote: post #19

I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from). There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cult…

>"We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in."

You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.

I get that the title sounds a bit sensational, but there really is something to AI adoption beyond book-sharing.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#119

Post by chrononaut »

walt_grata wrote: post #100
simonklitj wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t suppose he was entirely wrong. I would probably be able to recall a lot more (verbatim) if it all had to be stored in me noggin. I think the trade off worthwhile, however.

Im 45, and i can tell you getting a cell phone absolutely destroyed my ability to memorize phone numbers. During the 90s when i was in highschool i has all my friends numbers, parents work numbers, etc... memorized, i only know my parents and wife now. If you don't use a skill, that skill atrophies

> If you don't use a skill, that smo atrophies

I don't think the _ability_ to memorize phone numbers is what atrophied here by getting a cell phone. The _need_ did. It's harder to memorize phone numbers today because we lack the practical application of the memory (e.g. only when something fails do we actually try to put that memory to practice). I bet anyone would quickly pick up on memorizing phone numbers if they had to both remember and type in the phone numbers every time they wanted to make a call or text.

Re: LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

#120

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

jjk166 wrote: post #64

"If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." -Socrates

I think it was only after I had familiarised myself with hermeneutics that I really understood why the written word is problematic and what Socrates took issue with in writing.
Post reply on HN