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"Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#151

Post by hatthew »

yladiz wrote: post #117
hatthew wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs have no understanding of the underlying reality that language describes. LLMs absolutely have concepts that extend beyond just words. As early as 2008 (back when there were no large language models, only "regular" language models), we've been able to demonstrate things that seem to me like the model is learning abstract concepts. For a classic example, see Linguistic Regularities in Continuous Space Word Repre…

Are you sure the model in the paper linked and LLMs function similarly or identically in this regard?

No, but IMO an assertion that they have no understanding of the world has less supporting evidence than an assertion that they do have some level of understanding.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#152

Post by hatthew »

happytiger wrote: post #119
hatthew wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs have no understanding of the underlying reality that language describes. LLMs absolutely have concepts that extend beyond just words. As early as 2008 (back when there were no large language models, only "regular" language models), we've been able to demonstrate things that seem to me like the model is learning abstract concepts. For a classic example, see Linguistic Regularities in Continuous Space Word Repre…

I would suggest that example is more likely evidence of semantic associations provided by underlying taxonomy based on input training data. There is so much contextual information in language hierarchy and associated characteristics and there is nothing stopping a LLM from using multiple recombinant factors for generation. I don’t mean to discount your excellent comment. I mean obviously these models are so complex a…

Hmmm, do you mean that it recreates a hierarchy of words in its latent space? I would argue that such a structured spatial hierarchy is the model's understanding of the world.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#153

Post by timacles »

OrsonSmelles wrote: post #91
mjr00 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an odd article. To me, it seems like the "creative" arts are an ideal arena for AI. After all, there's no such thing as "wrong" art. Yeah but who wants to consume art purely generated by AI (that is, not human-created with AI support)? Most art sites have had blanket bans, or at least required tagging, on ai-generated art because people hate it so much. Or to put it another way: why are you in the comment s…

>why are you in the comment section of Hacker News and not just asking ChatGPT to generate social media comments on the article? Because I know the brains generating these comments have rich, diverse experience and a large set of refined, domain-specific heuristics derived from it - that is, they have top-notch training and alignment, at the cost of 20+ years of upfront incubation in an evolution-optimized meat harne…

You're confusing art with pretty pictures. AI "art" is not art, they are just pictures.

It has no meaning, it has no context, it is not inspired by anything. Art has depth, art has emotion.

Theres no AI pieces that someone "loves", theres nothing beyond, oh this is a cool image, it just doesnt exist.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#154

Post by OrsonSmelles »

timacles wrote: post #153
OrsonSmelles wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>why are you in the comment section of Hacker News and not just asking ChatGPT to generate social media comments on the article? Because I know the brains generating these comments have rich, diverse experience and a large set of refined, domain-specific heuristics derived from it - that is, they have top-notch training and alignment, at the cost of 20+ years of upfront incubation in an evolution-optimized meat harne…

You're confusing art with pretty pictures. AI "art" is not art, they are just pictures. It has no meaning, it has no context, it is not inspired by anything. Art has depth, art has emotion. Theres no AI pieces that someone "loves", theres nothing beyond, oh this is a cool image, it just doesnt exist.

>Art has depth, art has emotion

But significant portions of those qualities are imputed by the viewer! The artist has their own intent and experience during the creation of the art, but that only inheres in the art insofar as another mind can later recover some of that feeling upon viewing. Huge parts of the meaning of ancient (and more recent) art are lost forever because they depended on never-recorded cultural or personal understandings, and our emotional appreciation of them today largely hinges on how they make us imagine the past or our relationship to it. I think it's incredibly short-sighted to be certain that nobody does or will love any AI artwork when so much of appreciation is contingent on the mind of the of the beholder, which is not necessarily responding to real information about the work's creator, even when human.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#155

Post by [deleted] »

invig wrote: post #144
IIAOPSW wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, LLM's are, in the technical sense defined by Harry Frankfurt, bullshitters. The essence of bullshit (as he defines it) is that it is neither truth nor lie but rather unconcerned with veracity altogether. A bullshitter wants to appear smart, or convince others to agree with them, or some other conversational objective. Bullshit statements may or may not ultimately turn out to be true, but the thing tha…

Isn’t the same thing true of any human who isn’t doing scientific research? Like how much work to get to veracity is actually going on out there?

[deleted]

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#156

Post by thfuran »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #98
pdonis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are slowly gaining an understanding of reality by reverse engineering the relationships built into human languages. Perhaps the people building LLMs are doing this, but the LLMs themselves are not. LLMs are just generating text. They aren't "reverse engineering" anything. > The only reason LLMs are getting better is because they are better modeling the world. No, they are getting better at generating text that…

Here's a bit from an episode of This American Life that I think is relevant, cut into a post on my blog: https://danangell.com/blog/posts/gpt-understands/ > The idea is that back when GPT-4 was being trained for it to really consistently get the next word correct, to do that reliably, it had to do more than just bullshit. It had to do more than guess based on patterns. To get the next word right, it had to truly unde…

Does an analog circuit understand differential equations?

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#157

Post by pdonis »

gaganyaan wrote: post #148
pdonis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are slowly gaining an understanding of reality by reverse engineering the relationships built into human languages. Perhaps the people building LLMs are doing this, but the LLMs themselves are not. LLMs are just generating text. They aren't "reverse engineering" anything. > The only reason LLMs are getting better is because they are better modeling the world. No, they are getting better at generating text that…

> LLMs are just generating text. I really can't stand these low-effort takes. It's like saying "Human brains are just meat". You can summarize anything badly, but it's not helpful to the conversation. Whatever quibbles you have aside, LLMs are generating useful text, today. At some point you're just pointlessly privileging meat over silicon.

> It's like saying "Human brains are just meat".

No, it isn't, because human brains have rich semantic connections to the rest of the world. LLMs do not. So "LLMs are just generating text" is a justified description of their limitations, in a way that "human brains are just meat" is not.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#158

Post by pdonis »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #110
pdonis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> humans aren't "optimized" to be correct either Humans at least have a concept of "being correct", even if we don't always set that as our primary goal when communicating. LLMs don't even have a concept of "being correct". That would require having a concept of an "external world" that text refers to, which LLMs don't have. All they have is the text in their training data.

Humans do not _know_ the external world either. All humans have is perceptions from media like sounds, images and text! Internally we try to make a model of the world based on those perceptions. Any blanks are filled in by creativity ! Think about it, when we write or speak we start from some internalized model (which is mostly imperfect) and then we build text around it that feels fluent and consistent. I would argu…

> Humans do not _know_ the external world either. All humans have is perceptions

Wrong. Human beings can act on the world as well as perceive it, and humans have rich internal models of the world that get updated continously as a result of those rich two-way interactions.

> I would argue, human reasoning is conceptually not so much different from LLMs as one might think.

I would argue that this is either an incredible over-estimate of LLMs, or an incredibly impoverished view of humans.

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#159

Post by pdonis »

happytiger wrote: post #122
pdonis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> humans aren't "optimized" to be correct either Humans at least have a concept of "being correct", even if we don't always set that as our primary goal when communicating. LLMs don't even have a concept of "being correct". That would require having a concept of an "external world" that text refers to, which LLMs don't have. All they have is the text in their training data.

I love this point. One of the things that has been on my mind of late is the idea of how much of what humans call “correct” or “right” is actually socially generated pressures to conform. Berns and Asch’s various research on social conformity around what we normally would consider objectively correct answers seems to have some potential applications worth testing in AI land. AIs may be much more performant with AI “s…

> One of the things that has been on my mind of late is the idea of how much of what humans call “correct” or “right” is actually socially generated pressures to conform

And the only reason that is even a thing is that we humans have a concept of actually being right, which we can distinguish from "responding to socially generated pressures to conform".

Re: "Hallucinating" AIs sound creative, but let's not celebrate being wrong

#160

Post by pdonis »

famouswaffles wrote: post #107
pdonis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are quite literally trained to predict a distribution that could supply the next token given previous context. "Previous context" here means text . It does not mean "the actual world". Big difference.

So ? That's not a big difference lol. The world can be sufficiently represented in text. and bolting in additional modalities to a transformer is trivial. Could just as well be images and audio also. You think you experience the "true" world ? You don't. You experience a slice of it that your brain often further fabricates at parts. To the birds that feel and sense electromagnetic waves intuitively to guide travels,…

> That's not a big difference lol.

You must be joking. You really think there's not a big difference between a corpus of text downloaded from the Internet and the entire actual world? Or even the sense-data that humans (or birds, for that matter) take in from the world? (And that doesn't even take into account the actions that humans, and birds, take in the world, and then compare the results with what their internal model predicts in order to update the model.)

I don't even know how to respond to something that is so totally off base.

> You think you experience the "true" world ?

I have made no such claim.

> To the birds that feel and sense electromagnetic waves intuitively to guide travels, your model of vision and direction is fundamentally incomplete/incorrect.

Yes, but an LLM isn't a bird any more than it is a human. LLMs don't experience anything.

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