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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

#131

Post by bandoti »

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…

Just as alchemists searched for the Philosopher’s stone, we search for Artificial General Intelligence.

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

#132

Post by yahoozoo »

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…

Post the convo

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

#133

Post by ramchip »

clejack wrote: post #106

Are people still experiencing llms getting stuck in knowledge and comprehension loops? I used them but not excessively, and I'm not heavily tracking their performance either. For example, if you ask an llm a question, and it produces a hallucination then you try to correct it or explain to it that it is incorrect; and it produces a near identical hallucination while implying that it has produced a new, correct result…

Like the article says... I feel it's counter-productive to picture an LLM as "learning" or "thinking". It's just a text generator. If it's producing code that calls non-existent APIs for instance, it's kind of a waste of time to try to explain to the LLM that so-and-so doesn't exist. Better just try again and dump an OpenAPI doc or some sample code into it to influence the text generator towards correct output.

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

#134

Post by carlosjobim »

mettamage wrote: post #5

> Few phenomena demonstrate the perils that can accompany AI illiteracy as well as “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the subject of a recent Rolling Stone article about the growing number of people who think their LLM is a sapient spiritual guide. Some users have come to believe that the chatbot they’re interacting with is a god—“ChatGPT Jesus,” as a man whose wife fell prey to LLM-inspired delusions put it—while others a…

We were warned:

“You shall not make idols for yourselves or erect an image or pillar, and you shall not set up a figured stone in your land to bow down to it, for I am the LORD your God."

A computer chip is a stone (silicon) which has been engraved. It's a graven image.

Anything man-made is always unworthy of worship. That includes computer programs such as AI. That includes man-made ideas such as "the government", a political party, or other abstract ideas. That also includes any man or woman. But the human natural instinct is to worship a king, pharaoh or an emperor - or to worship a physical object.

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

#135

Post by bandoti »

krisoft wrote: post #50
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…

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…

Funny I just entered “feather” into Merriam-Webster dictionary and there’s your word “barb”. Point being, people should use a dictionary/thesaurus before burning fuel on an AI.

1 a : any of the light, horny, epidermal outgrowths that form the external covering of the body of birds

NOTE: Feathers include the smaller down feathers and the larger contour and flight feathers. Larger feathers consist of a shaft (rachis) bearing branches (barbs) which bear smaller branches (barbules). These smaller branches bear tiny hook-bearing processes (barbicels) which interlock with the barbules of an adjacent barb to link the barbs into a continuous stiff vane. Down feathers lack barbules, resulting in fluffy feathers which provide insulation below the contour feathers.

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

#136

Post by whilenot-dev »

megaloblasto wrote: post #119
simonw wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just look for any company that offers data annotation as a service, they seem happy to explain their process in detail[0]. There's even a link to a paper from OpenAI[1] and some news about the contractor count[2].

[0]: https://snorkel.ai/data-labeling/#Data-labeling-in-the-age-o...

[1]: https://cdn.openai.com/papers/Training_language_models_to_fo...

[2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-openai-contractor-la...

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

#137

Post by dingnuts »

bandoti wrote: post #135
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…

Funny I just entered “feather” into Merriam-Webster dictionary and there’s your word “barb”. Point being, people should use a dictionary/thesaurus before burning fuel on an AI. 1 a : any of the light, horny, epidermal outgrowths that form the external covering of the body of birds NOTE: Feathers include the smaller down feathers and the larger contour and flight feathers. Larger feathers consist of a shaft (rachis) b…

This is a great example because the LLM answer was insufficiently complete but if you didn't look up the result you wouldn't know. I think I remain an AI skeptic because I keep looking up the results and this kind of omission is more common than not.

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

#138

Post by tim333 »

Zak wrote: post #114
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.)

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.

Yeah, as mentioned in another comment ChatGPT said "not generally effective" which I guess it hallucinated. It's actually a tricky question because the answer isn't really there in a straightforward way on the general web and I only know for sure because me and someone I know tried it. Although I guess a pesticide expert would find it easy.

Part of the reason is clothianidin is too effective at killing insects and tends to persist in the environment and kill bees and butterflies and the like so it isn't recommended for harmless stuff like carpet beetles. I was actually using it for something else and curious if it would take out the beetles as a side effect.

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

#139

Post by tim333 »

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.

I agree in general but it wasn't of much importance whether my carpet beetles died or not.

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

#140

Post by dingnuts »

hexaga wrote: post #61
kelseyfrog wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News deserves a stronger counterargument than “this is silly.” My original comment is making a structural point, not a mystical one. It’s not saying that using AI feels like praying to a god, it's saying the interaction pattern mirrors forms of ritualized inquiry: question → symbolic output → interpretive response. You can disagree with the framing, but dismissing it as "I don’t like AI so I’m going to pontifi…

> Hacker News deserves a stronger counterargument than “this is silly.” Their counterargument is that said structural definition is overly broad, to the point of including any and all forms of symbolic communication (which is all of them). Because of that, your argument based on it doesn't really say anything at all about AI or divination, yet still seems 'deep' and mystical and wise. But this is a seeming only. And…

You're misunderstanding the point of structural analysis. Comparing AI to divination isn't about making everything equivalent, but about highlighting specific shared structures that reveal how humans interact with these systems. The fact that this comparison can be extended to other domains doesn't make it meaningless.

The issue isn't "cached intuitions" about divination, but rather that you're reading the comparison too literally. It's not about importing every historical association, but about identifying specific parallels that shed light on user behavior and expectations.

Your proposed "resolutions" are based on a false dichotomy between total equivalence and total abandonment of comparison. Structural analysis can be useful even if it's not a perfect fit. The comparison isn't about labeling AI as "divination" in the classical sense, but about understanding the interpretive practices involved in human-AI interaction.

You're sidestepping the actual insight here, which is that humans tend to project meaning onto ambiguous outputs from systems they perceive as having special insight or authority. That's a meaningful observation, regardless of whether AI is "causally disentangled from reality" or not.

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