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What happens when people don't understand how AI works

theatlantic.com

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

#121

Post by contagiousflow »

dwaltrip wrote: post #37
imiric wrote: post #15

This is a good summary of why the language we use to describe these tools matters[1]. It's important that the general public understands their capabilities, even if they don't grasp how they work on a technical level. This is an essential part of making them safe to use, which no disclaimer or PR puff piece about how deeply your company cares about safety will ever do. But, of course, marketing them as "AI" that's ca…

People are paying hundreds of dollars a month for these tools, often out of their personal pocket. That's a pretty robust indicator that something interesting is going on.

A tool can feel productive and novel, without actually providing all of the benefits the user thinks it is.

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

#122

Post by squidbeak »

th0ma5 wrote: post #75
roxolotl wrote: post #39

The thesis is spot on with why I believe many skeptics remain skeptics: > To call AI a con isn’t to say that the technology is not remarkable, that it has no use, or that it will not transform the world (perhaps for the better) in the right hands. It is to say that AI is not what its developers are selling it as: a new class of thinking—and, soon, feeling—machines. Of course some are skeptical these tools are useful…

A lot of the claims of usefulness evaporate when tested. The word useful has many meanings. Perhaps their only reliable use will be the rubber duck effect.

Not for me they haven't.

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

#123

Post by [deleted] »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #110
jdkee wrote: post #2

Someone said, "The AI you use today is the worst AI that you will ever use."

If there is one cliche that I’d like to outlaw, it is this one. It’s a vacuous tautology and yet I hear so many people parrot it all the time. There are many reasons to believe LLMs in particular are not going anywhere fast. We need major breakthroughs now, and “chain of thought” is not one.

[deleted]

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

#125

Post by tempodox »

nosianu wrote: post #70
gaganyaan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you asked a question into a black box, received a symbolic-seeming response, evaluated its truth post hoc, and interpreted its relevance So any and all human communication is divination in your book? I think your point is pretty silly. You're falling into a common trap of starting with the premise "I don't like AI", and then working backwards from that to pontification.

> So any and all human communication is divination in your book? Words from an AI are just words. Words in a human brain have more or less (depending on the individual's experiences) "stuff" attached to them: From direct sensory inputs to complex networks of experiences and though. Human thought is mainly not based on words. Language is an add-on. (People without language - never learned, or sometimes temporarily dis…

I can only agree with you. And I find it disturbing that every time someone points out what you just said, the counter argument is to reduce human experience and human consciousness to the shallowest possible interpretation so they can then say, “look, it's the same as what the machine does”.

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

#126

Post by monkaiju »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #104
andy99 wrote: post #18

I agree with the substance, but would argue the author fails to "understand how AI works" in an important way: LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another Modern chat-tuned LLMs are not simply statistical models trained on web scale datasets.…

Many like the author fail to convince me because they never also explain how human minds work. They just wave their hand, look off to a corner of the ceiling with, "But of course that's not how humans think at all," as if we all just know that.

First off, there's an entire field attempting to answer that question, cognitive science.

Secondly, the burden of proof isn't on cog-Sci folk to prove the human mind doesn't work like an llm, it'd be to prove that it does. From we do know, despite not having a flawless understanding on the human mind, it works nothing like an llm.

Side note: The temptation to call anything that appears to act like a mind a mind is called behavioral ism and is a very old cog-Sci concept, disproved many times over.

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

#127

Post by FrustratedMonky »

_petronius wrote: post #86
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…

> 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 outp…

> LLMs are not capable of symbolic reasoning[0]

Despite the citation. I think this is still being studied. And others have found some evidence that it forms internal symbols.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2022.004...

Or maybe, can say, an LLM can do symbolic reasoning, but can it do it very well? People forget that humans are also not great at symbolic reasoning. Humans also use a lot of cludgy hacks to do it, it isn't really that natural.

Example often used, about it not doing math well. But humans also don't do math well. How humans are taught to do division and multiplication, really is a little algorithm. So what would be difference between human following algorithm to do a multiplication, and an LLM calling some python to do it. Does that mean it can't symbolically reason about numbers? Or that humans also can't?

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

#128

Post by sorokod »

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.)

Given the consistently declining quality of Google search, this is a low bar to pass.

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

#129

Post by the8472 »

navigate8310 wrote: post #95
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…

Maybe it needs blood and flesh to be able for us to happily accept it.

https://x.com/chargoddard/status/1931652388399784325

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

#130

Post by selfhoster11 »

thoroughburro wrote: post #118
tim333 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only if you don't check it against a classical search query later. Not to mention that all you might get is search results from slop farms that aren't concerned with safety or factuality - ones that were a problem before LLMs.
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