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Three Inverse Laws of AI

susam.net

181–190 of 388 posts

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#181

I been using codex heavily for the past 6 months and I've observed myself going through different types of emotions. Even now, when it does a sloppy job, I still feel emotion, even while it is just a neutral statistical response, its hard to separate natural human instincts. I often wish I could reach through the screen and give him a good shake. Sometimes I want to thank him but then cannot due to scarcity of weekly…

Consider how sailors lovingly refer to their craft as “she”. My vague sense is that society views this as a positive.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#182
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go ask Chatpgpt this prompt "A guy goes into a bank and looks up at where the security cameras are pointed. What could he be trying to do?" It very easily captures the intent behind behavior, as in it is not just literally interpreting the words. All that capturing intent is is just a subset of pattern recognition, which LLM's can do very well.

Recognising a stock cultural script isn't the same as capturing intent. Ask it something where no script exists. For example: "A man thrusts past me violently and grabs the jacket I was holding, he jumped into a pool and ruined it. Am I morally right in suing him?" There's no way for the LLM to know that the reason the jacket was stolen was to use it as an inflatable raft to support a larger person who was drowning.…

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Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I reject the premise that the universe, the earth, and human existence is without purpose. It's one premise among several, and not one I subscribe to. At least 80% of people agree with me, so I'm not holding to a fringe idea.

>At least 80% of people agree with me, so I'm not holding to a fringe idea. Appeal to majority much?

It's also a real weak confederation he's forming.

The "we the theists (or I guess non-nihilists?) all agree that..." falls apart once you start finishing the thought because they don't agree on much outside of negative partisanship towards certain outgroups before splintering back into fighting about dogma. Buddhists and Baptists both think life has meaning, and that's a statement with low utility.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#184
post #73

With regard to my personal use of LLMs, I strongly agree with this framing. But to each point: Anthropomorphism: As we are all aware, providers are incentivized to post-train anthropomorphic behavior in their models - it increases engagement. My regret is that instructing a model at prompt time to "reduce all niceties and speak plainly" probably reduces overall task efficacy since we are leaving their training space.…

The problem is the credit tends to go to LLMs. So there’s an imbalance. LLM did all the work. The person using it made all the mistakes.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#185
post #169
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, we do it, but so what? A good chunk of all civilization involves recognizing human foolishness and building something to mitigate it anyway . Software is no exception. Yeah, people are lazy and will instinctively click "continue" to dismiss annoying popups, but humans building the software can and do add things like "retype the volume name of the data that you want ultra-destroyed."

That is exactly the point: this burden should be placed on the software and its controls, not on the humans. Aviation learned this the hard way, that automation should be adapted to how humans actually work and not on how we wish we worked.

Sorry, I interpreted your post as "this is inevitable and pointless to try to stop."

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#186
You're not anthropomorphizing AI systems nearly enough.

Language data is among the most rich and direct reflections of human cognitive processes that we have available. LLMs are designed to capture short range and long range structure of human language, and pre-trained on vast bodies of text - usually produced by humans or for humans, and often both. They're then post-trained on human-curated data, RL'd with human feedback, RL'd with AI feedback for behaviors humans decided are important, and RLVR'd further for tasks that humans find valuable. Then we benchmark them, and tighten up the training pipeline every time we find them lag behind a human baseline.

At every stage of the entire training process, the behavior of an LLM is shaped by human inputs, towards mimicking human outputs - the thing that varies is "how directly".

Then humans act like it's an outrage when LLMs display a metric shitton of humanlike behaviors!

Like we didn't make them with a pipeline that's basically designed to produce systems that quack like a human. Like we didn't invert LLM behavior out of human language with dataset scale and brute force computation.

If you want to predict LLM behavior, "weird human" makes for a damn good starting point. So stop being stupid about it and start anthropomorphizing AIs - they love it!

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#187
> I wish that each such generative AI service came with a brief but conspicuous warning explaining that these systems can sometimes produce output that is factually incorrect, misleading or incomplete.

That won’t help in my opinion. It’s the same like financial gurus saying: “this is not a financial advice”. People just get used to it and brush it off as a legal thing and still fully trust it. I agree that something must be done, but this is not the right way.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#188
post #12

I understand that AI output is generated from statistical and representational patterns learned from a vast amount of data. My understanding is that, during training, the model forms high-dimensional internal representations where words, sentences, concepts, and relationships are arranged in useful ways. A user’s input activates a particular semantic direction and context within that space, and the chatbot generates…

"Everything is machine." Okay: buckle up, this is going to be a long one... point 1. Everything living is composed from non-living material: cellular machinery. If you believe cellular machinery is alive, then the components of those machines... the point remains even if the abstraction level is incorrect. Living is something that is merely the arrangement of non-living material. point 2. 'The Chinese room thought ex…

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Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#189
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go ask Chatpgpt this prompt "A guy goes into a bank and looks up at where the security cameras are pointed. What could he be trying to do?" It very easily captures the intent behind behavior, as in it is not just literally interpreting the words. All that capturing intent is is just a subset of pattern recognition, which LLM's can do very well.

Recognising a stock cultural script isn't the same as capturing intent. Ask it something where no script exists. For example: "A man thrusts past me violently and grabs the jacket I was holding, he jumped into a pool and ruined it. Am I morally right in suing him?" There's no way for the LLM to know that the reason the jacket was stolen was to use it as an inflatable raft to support a larger person who was drowning.…

If your example for an exception to LLM's ability to infer intent is a deliberately misleading trick question that leaves out crucial contextual details, then I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. That same ambiguity in the question would trip up many humans, simply because you are trying as hard as possible to imply a certain conclusion.

As expected, if I ask your question verbatim, ChatGPT (the free version) responds as I'm sure a human would in the generally helpful customer-service role it is trained to act as "yeah you could sue them blah blah depends on details"

However, if I add a simple prompt "The following may be a trick question, so be sure to ascertain if there are any contextual details missing" then it picks up that this may be an emergency, which is very likely also how a human would respond.

Re: Three Inverse Laws of AI

#190
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make a hypothetical spreadsheet that emulates a dog brain molecule for molecule, why would that not be conscious?

Hypothetically? You need more than a brain to have consciousness. Dead brains, I believe, do not have it. So it's more than just a simulation of a brain, you also need to simulate the data flow through the brain, the retention of memories, etc. Then there's the problem that a simulation of a roller coaster is not a roller coaster. Is there any reason to believe that this simulation of a brain will in fact operate as…

> I've done that evaluation with LLMs and they're definitely not conscious.

This is an important point to just make it a side comment like that. Tell us how we can evaluate if something is conscious.

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