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I'm becoming AI-blind

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Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#221

Post by rcxdude »

thfuran wrote: post #214
tshaddox wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "intelligence" needs to carry all the intrigue and woo of related words like "consciousness" or "creative." If we just use "intelligence" to mean "the ability of a system to solve problems that are new to the system," that pretty much matches the dictionary definition and normal usage of the term. We don't need to touch messy questions like "is there something it's like to be a bat" to conclude that bat…

I'm not exactly that you mean by "new to the system", but it seems to me that that definition makes a calculator intelligent, which I can't agree with.

Intelligence isn't a binary property. Is it really a problem to say that a calculator has some intelligence? That it's more intelligent than e.g. a rock?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#222

Post by setopt »

wongarsu wrote: post #98
pyridines wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just can't accept that it possesses no intelligence. It is not equivalent to human intelligence, obviously, but how can a system without some semblance of rational thinking solve open math problems? Even composing earlier human work into something novel requires intelligence and understanding on some level.

We couldn't agree on what intelligence means before ChatGPT happened. Now, agreement on the term seems even further away If performing well on an IQ test or performing at a high level on knowledge work is intelligence to you, these models are intelligent. If intelligence requires sentience for you, then ... well, I don't think we really agree what that is either, never mind how to measure it. But LLMs certainly don't…

> But the consistent trend of the last couple decades (arguably since Turing's time) seems to be that any time a computer reaches our definition of intelligence we decide that that was a flawed definition

I do recall a couple of decades ago, when the Turing test was discussed as the big goal that seemed so far away. Then LLMs arguably did pass the test, and no one cared about the test anymore.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#223

Post by rcxdude »

staticman2 wrote: post #208
prophesi wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing whether you believe it possesses intelligence or not depends on your answer to Searle's Chinese room thought experiment[0]. I'd also recommend checking out the Peter Watts' book, Blindsight. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

This comment thread was started with discussions of AI doing a bad job at a task (communication). Doesn't the Chinese Room posit an AI good at the task of communication?

The Chinese Room mainly just posits a room that passes the Turing Test, which LLMs do pretty well outside of outright adversarial situations.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#224

Post by serbuvlad »

josh-sematic wrote: post #207
bluetomcat wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has no semantic depth. The sentences and the paragraphs are a statistically viable derivation of existing human text, but once you try to grasp the whole thing with its temporal and spatial dimensions, you are left with a blurry mess that rots your brain. It's a polished, inoffensive and shallow interpretation as written by an opinionated reputation-seeking user of Quora, circa 2019. Assertive, bold, without typos…

Yeah, I hated all those Quora users that would just spew out semantically meaningless slop like increasing an important bound for the Riemann hypothesis. https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/564f962e60643842f5fcb4a17c9dbc...

It's all so tiring.

Everyone decides what to think on this issue, then finds out facts to support their idea.

As it stands they are massively useful tools, but for generating usable products they require either A) a lot of expert steering or B) a well defined easily verifiable target and a large compute budget. Most people are using them in mode A with good effect, the progress on math has been done in mode B, which is very promising.

Just a year and a half ago their maximal use was rephrase, summarize, and homework-level tasks.

Five years from now? There be dragons.

"But are they generally intelligent?" What a meaningless question!

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#225

Post by rcxdude »

dwattttt wrote: post #211
Quarrelsome wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesti…

> I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesting things than a lot of humans. So does the Google search bar, but I don't ascribe intelligence to it.

The google search bar is surprisingly smart sometimes. What's your definition of intelligence that completely excludes most of what a computer does?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#226

Post by MagicMoonlight »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #213
dwattttt wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesting things than a lot of humans. So does the Google search bar, but I don't ascribe intelligence to it.

The Google search bar is not capable of generating original text though. LLMs definitely are - you can get pretty creative output easily.

[dead]

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#227

Post by john01dav »

causal wrote: post #30

There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is dee…

> There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here".

The roots of llm math in part lie in compressing natural language such that there's only information there, and then running the reverse to create way more text without new information in a somewhat precise theoretical sense.

Some more information: https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#228

Post by dwattttt »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #213
dwattttt wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesting things than a lot of humans. So does the Google search bar, but I don't ascribe intelligence to it.

The Google search bar is not capable of generating original text though. LLMs definitely are - you can get pretty creative output easily.

String concatenation will generate "original text" by that definition.

Obligatory "yes, I know that's not what an LLM is", purely pointing out the metric.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#229

Post by tshaddox »

thfuran wrote: post #214
tshaddox wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "intelligence" needs to carry all the intrigue and woo of related words like "consciousness" or "creative." If we just use "intelligence" to mean "the ability of a system to solve problems that are new to the system," that pretty much matches the dictionary definition and normal usage of the term. We don't need to touch messy questions like "is there something it's like to be a bat" to conclude that bat…

I'm not exactly that you mean by "new to the system", but it seems to me that that definition makes a calculator intelligent, which I can't agree with.

It's a continuum, and things very low on the intelligence continuum might not be referred to as intelligent in everyday usage. But many calculators are Turing complete and can thus clearly perform computations that I would consider intelligent. The basic algorithms used by simple calculators to perform arithmetic would be extremely low on the intelligent continuum.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#230

Post by dwattttt »

rcxdude wrote: post #225
dwattttt wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like that what a lot of people who say this don't seem to grasp, is that despite this flaw its still often capable of saying more interesting things than a lot of humans. So does the Google search bar, but I don't ascribe intelligence to it.

The google search bar is surprisingly smart sometimes. What's your definition of intelligence that completely excludes most of what a computer does?

Happily, I don't need to define "intelligence" here, because it's squarely in "I know it when I see it" territory. It's notoriously hard to define.

I also don't ascribe intelligence to a pocket calculator.

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