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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#181

Post by salad-tycoon »

hermannj314 wrote: post #138
noemit wrote: post #106

Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.) I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally diff…

only code anyone will be touching in a museum in 800 years will be the good code. I hope they don't talk about what great craftsmen we all were because someone saw an original Fabrice Bellard at the Louvre. Survivor bias plays a role in glorifying the past.

Agreed, I think the good gained by wool mills is greater in that little Timmy is less likely to lose a leg to frostbite than the bad loss of my scarf not passing through a ring.

Long term though, I’ve always wondered if the Amish turn out to be the only survivors.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#182

Post by aosnsbbz »

forinti wrote: post #161
noemit wrote: post #106

Many people don't know this, but the Luddites were right. I studied Art History and this particular movement. One of the claims of the Luddites is that quality would go down, because their craft took half a lifetime to master (it was passed down from parent to chile.) I was able to feel wool scarves made in europe from the middle ages. (In museum storage, under the guidance of a curator) They are a fundamentally diff…

Your comment made me think of the Japanese. They have a highly industrialised society, but they also value greatly hand-made products from food and clothes to woodwork and houses. And they also like to emphasise how long it takes for someone to become a master at a given trade.

It was really eye opening seeing they’re able to eat raw eggs and (to maybe a lesser degree of safety) raw chicken because their society requires high standards of cleanliness in food production. We are literal cattle over here in the states.

Though, given Amodei and Altman’s behavior (along with the rest of the billionaire class) that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#183

Post by Ensorceled »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #158
bartread wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Classic procedural generation is noteworthy here as a precedent, which gamers were already familiar with, because by and large it has failed to deliver. Yes, this is a wildly uneducated perspective. Procedural generation has often been a key component of some incredibly successful, and even iconic games going back decades. Elite is a canonical example here, with its galaxies being procedurally generated. Powermonge…

Is it wildly uneducated to not know any of the games you mentioned? I didn’t realize education covered less known video games? Wouldn’t a better example be No Man’s Sky, if we’re talking procedural gen and eventually a good game. In any case, I agree that gamers by and large don’t care to what extent the game creation was automated. They are happy to use automated enemies, automated allies, automated armies and pre-m…

> Is it wildly uneducated to not know any of the games you mentioned? I didn’t realize education covered less known video games?

Yes. It is "wildly uneducated" to have, and express, strong opinions about ANY field of endeavour where you are unfamiliar with large parts of that field.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#184

Post by larodi »

raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

> No one cares about how the code is written.

I would overstate:

No one even cares how architecture is done. Unless you are the one fixing it or maintaining it.

Sorry, no one. We all know Apple did some great stuff with their code, but we care more about the awful work done on the UI, right? I mean - the UI seems to not be breaking in these new OSs which is amazing feature... for a game perhaps, and most likely the code is top notch. But we care about other things.

This is the reality, and the blind notion that so-many people care about code is super untrue. Perhaps someone putting money on developers care, but we have so many examples already of money put on implementation no matter what the code is. We can see everywhere funds thrown at obnoxious implementations, and particularly in large enterprises, that are only sustained by the weird ecosystem of white-collar jobs that sustains this impression.

Very few people care about the code in total, and this can be observed very easy, perhaps it can be proved no other way around is possible.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#185

Post by notepad0x90 »

The framing of an LLM's response as truth vs lie is in itself incorrect.

In order to lie, one needs to understand what truth and objective reality are.

Even with people, when a flat-earther tells you the earth is flat, they're not lying, they're just wrong.

All LLM output is speculation. All speculation, by definition, has some probability of being incorrect.

---

We can go even deeper in a philosophical sense. If I made the audacious claim that 2 +2 = 4, I may think it's true, but I'm still speculating that the objective reality I experience is the same one others also experience, and that my senses and mental faculties, and therefore the qualia making up my reality, are indeed intact, correct, and functional. So is there a degree of speculation when I made that claim?

Regardless, I am able to agree upon a shared reality with the rest of the world, and I also share a common understanding of truth and untruth. If I lied, it can only be caused by an intention to mislead others. For example, if I claimed to be the president of the united states, of course that would be incorrect (thankfully!), but since we all agree that no one reading this post would actually be mislead into thinking I am the POTUS, then it isn't a lie. Perhaps sarcasm, a failed attempt at humor, or just trolling. it is untruth, but it isn't a lie, no one was mislead. You need intent (LLM isn't capable of one), and that intent needs to be at least in part, an intent to mislead.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#186

Post by Extasia785 »

I don't agree with many statements in the article. It almost seems like an article from about a year ago, despite it being posted yesterday. Not sure if the author had the idea a long time ago and just took his time to finish it up, but the "vibe-coding" he describes surely isn't the current way of using LLMs in a codebase.

While LLMs are surely used to generate a lot of slop-code and overwhelm (open source) code bases, this surely isn't the only thing they can do. I dislike discussing the potential of a technology exclusively by looking at its negative impact.

LLMs in proper hands don't create code which is "stolen", they also shouldn't create unnecessary code and definitely don't remove any of the ownership of the programmer, at least not any more than using a mighty IDE does.

The problem seems to be in the usage of LLMs. These effects definitely do happen when just releasing an agent on a codebase without any oversight. But they can also largely be mitigated by using frameworks such as Openspec or Spec-Kit, properly designing a spec, plan, granular tasks and manually reviewing all code yourself. The LLM should not be responsible for any creative idea, it should at most verify the practicality against the codebase. When doing that, the entire creative control is in the hands of the programmer and so is the mechanical execution. The LLM is reduced to a very powerful autocomplete with a strict harness around it. Obviously this also doesn't lead to 10x or even 100x improvements in speed like some AI merchants promise, but in my personal experience the speedup is still significant enough to make LLMs a very, very useful technology.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#187

Post by utopiah »

endymion-light wrote: post #110
utopiah wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get lost on the ice and you have someone who confidently tells you the path but is sometimes wrong, is it actually helpful? PS: sorry if the analogy is a bit wonky but it's quite dear to me as I do ice skating on frozen lakes and it's basically a life or death information "game" that I can relate to. It might not be a great analogy for others.

Haha it's a good analogy, i'm being a little bit argumentative for the sake of it potentially. I guess in my view - the main alternative you'd have beforehand is just to drown. For me, AI sits in a space where if you know how to use it, it can tell you all the thin spots of the ice accurately. You can then verify those spots, but there's a level of personal responsibility of verification. I'd agree there's currently…

> AI sits in a space where if you know how to use it, it can tell you all the thin spots of the ice accurately. You can then verify those spots, but there's a level of personal responsibility of verification.

Right, but AFAICT most people just venture over the ice and don't bother to check. In fact a lot of people venture there, do check once or twice, then check less and less frequently. The fact that you do it is great but others seem a lot less careful, until cracks start to show and then it might be too late.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#188

Post by wnevets »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #185

The framing of an LLM's response as truth vs lie is in itself incorrect. In order to lie, one needs to understand what truth and objective reality are. Even with people, when a flat-earther tells you the earth is flat, they're not lying, they're just wrong. All LLM output is speculation. All speculation, by definition, has some probability of being incorrect. --- We can go even deeper in a philosophical sense. If I m…

> Even with people, when a flat-earther tells you the earth is flat, they're not lying, they're just wrong.

Atleast some of them know they're wrong and are thus lying.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#189

Post by h2zizzle »

krige wrote: post #103
raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

> Spore is well acclaimed And yet it also effectively ended Will Wright's career. Rave press reviews are not a good indicator of anything, really.

Tbf Spore's acclaim comes with the caveat that it completely failed to live up to years of pre-release hype. Much of the goodwill it's garnered since, which is reflected in review scores, only came after the storm of controversy over Spore not being "the ultimate simulator which would mark the 'end of history' for gaming" died down.

And you wouldn't really have any idea this was the case if you weren't there when it happened.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#190

Post by endymion-light »

Jensson wrote: post #151
endymion-light wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha it's a good analogy, i'm being a little bit argumentative for the sake of it potentially. I guess in my view - the main alternative you'd have beforehand is just to drown. For me, AI sits in a space where if you know how to use it, it can tell you all the thin spots of the ice accurately. You can then verify those spots, but there's a level of personal responsibility of verification. I'd agree there's currently…

> I guess in my view - the main alternative you'd have beforehand is just to drown. Before most who didn't know the ice didn't went out on it, today a lot of people who shouldn't be there go far out on the ice.

Totally true - althuogh I feel like that's been the case since the first coding bootcamps
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