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What happens when people don't understand how AI works

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

#271

Post by bsoles »

jhedwards wrote: post #156
AlecSchueler wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is what's different in your own "thinking?"

Thinking in humans is prior to language. The language apparatus is embedded in a living organism which has a biological state that produces thoughts and feelings, goals and desires. Language is then used to communicate these underlying things, which themselves are not linguistic in nature (though of course the causality is so complex that the may be _influenced_ by language among other things).

> Thinking in humans is prior to language.

I am sure philosophers must have debated this for millennia. But I can't seem to be able to think without an inner voice (language), which makes me think that thinking may not be prior (or without) language. Same thing also happens to me when reading: there is an inner voice going on constantly.

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

#272

Post by zeknife »

ufmace wrote: post #232
duxup wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The terminology is so confusing in AI right now. I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them. Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use terms like "thinking" or similar terms. I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.

I've tended to agree with this line of argument, but on the other hand... I expect that anybody you asked 10 years ago who was at least decently knowledgeable about tech and AI would have agreed that the Turing Test is a pretty decent way to determine if we have a "real" AI, that's actually "thinking" and is on the road to AGI etc. Well, the current generation of LLMs blow away that Turing Test. So, what now? Were we…

By what definition of turing test? LLMs are by no means capable of passing for human in a direct comparison and under scrutiny, they don't even have enough perception to succeed in theory.

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

#273

Post by benjismith »

zephyr9 wrote: post #82
lordnacho wrote: post #76

The article skirts around a central question: what defines humans? Specifically, intelligence and emotions? The entire article is saying "it looks kinds like a human in some ways, but people are being fooled!" You can't really say that without at least attempting the admittedly very deep question of what an authentic human is. To me, it's intelligent because I can't distinguish its output from a person's output, for…

> isn't this also telling us what "understanding" is? When people start studying theory of mind someone usually jumps in with this thought. It's more or less a description of Functionalism (although minus the "mental state"). It's not very popular because most people can immediately identify an phenomenon of understanding separate from the function of understanding. People also have immediate understanding of certain…

A similar kind of question about "understanding" is asking whether a house cat understands the physics of leaping up onto a countertop. When you see the cat preparing to jump, it take a moment and gazes upward to its target. Then it wiggles its rump, shifts its tail, and springs up into the air.

Do you think there are components of the cat's brain that calculate forces and trajectories, incorporating the gravitational constant and the cat's static mass?

Probably not.

So, does a cat "understand" the physics of jumping?

The cat's knowledge about jumping comes from trial and error, and their brain builds a neural network that encodes the important details about successful and unsuccessful jumping parameters. Even if the cat has no direct cognitive access to those parameters.

So the cat can "understand" jumping without having a "meta-understanding" about their understanding. When a cat "thinks" about jumping, and prepares to leap, they aren't rehearsing their understanding of the physics, but repeating the ritual that has historically lead them to perform successful jumps in the past.

I think the theory of mind of an LLM is like that. In my interactions with LLMs, I think "thinking" is a reasonable word to describe what they're doing. And I don't think it will be very long before I'd also use the word "consciousness" to describe the architecture of their thought processes.

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

#274

Post by zeknife »

bsoles wrote: post #271
jhedwards wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking in humans is prior to language. The language apparatus is embedded in a living organism which has a biological state that produces thoughts and feelings, goals and desires. Language is then used to communicate these underlying things, which themselves are not linguistic in nature (though of course the causality is so complex that the may be _influenced_ by language among other things).

> Thinking in humans is prior to language. I am sure philosophers must have debated this for millennia. But I can't seem to be able to think without an inner voice (language), which makes me think that thinking may not be prior (or without) language. Same thing also happens to me when reading: there is an inner voice going on constantly.

Thinking is subconscious when working on complex problems. Thinking is symbolic or spatial when working in relevant domains. And in my own experience, I often know what is going to come next in my internal monologues, without having to actually put words to the thoughts. That is, the thinking has already happened and the words are just narration.

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

#275

Post by 827a »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #228
mjburgess wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming that because we measure an undergrad's ability to critical think with undergrad essays, that is a valid test for the LLM's capacity to think -- it isnt. This measures only, extremely narrowly, the LLM's capacity to produce undergrad essays. Society doesnt require undergrad essays. Nor does it require yet another webserver, iot script, or weekend hobby project. Society has all of those things already,…

if this is how you feel you haven't really used llms enough or are deliberately ignoring sporadically appearing data. github copilot for me routinely solves microproblems in unexplored areas it has no business knowing. Not always, but it's also not zero. ...and i encourage you to be more realistic about the market and what society "needs". does society really need an army of consultants at accenture? i dont know. but…

Bro you have as serious problem with reading the first few sentences of a comment, finding something you disagree with, then skipping over the entire rest of the comment, characterizing it as "well they must entirely disagree with my worldview and now I'm under attack". You gotta take a step back.

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

#276

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

randomopining wrote: post #244
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone want to read less and not more? It'd be like reading movie spoilers so you didn't have to sit through 2 hours to find out what happened.

Why is the word grass 5 letters instead of 500? It's because it's a short and efficient way to transfer information. If AI is able to improve information transfer that's amazing

This is why you make sure to compress all your jpegs at 15% quality, so that the information transfer is most efficient, eh?

When I read (when everyone reads), I'm learning new words, new expressions, seeing how other people (the writer in this case) thinks, etc. The point was never just the information. This is why everyone becomes a retard when they rely on the "AI"... we've all seen those horror stories and don't know whether to believe them or not, but we sort of suspect that they must be true if embellished. You know, the ones where the office drone doesn't know how to write a simple email, where the college kid turning in A-graded essays can't scribble out caveman grunts on the paper test. I will refrain from deliberately making myself less intelligent if I have any say in the matter. You're living your life wrong.

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

#277

Post by kelseyfrog »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #231
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…

You're getting some pushback about the analogy to divination, but I think most people here are reasonably technically literate and they assume that everyone else in society has the same understanding of how LLMs work that they do. When I chat about LLM usage with non-technical friends and family it does indeed seem as though they're using these AI chatbots as oracles. When I suggest that they should be wary because t…

Thank you. I really appreciated your comment.

> I think we the technorati need to be educating non-technical users of these things as much as possible in order to demystify them so that people don't treat them like oracles.

Exactly. That phrase "meeting people where they're at" comes to mind. Less as a slogan and more as an pedagogical principle. It's not enough to deliver information, it's important to consider how people make sense of the world in the first place.

Like you pointed out, the analogy to divination isn't meant to mystify the tech. It's meant to describe how, to many people, this interface feels. And when people interact with a system in a way that feels like consulting an oracle, we can't dismiss that as ignorance. We have to understand it as a real feature of how people relate to symbolic systems. That includes search engines, card catalogs, and yes, LLMs.

This is one of the densest concentrations of AI-literate minds on the internet. That's exactly why I think it's worth introducing frames from outside the dominant paradigm: anthropology, semiotics, sociology. It's not to be sill or weird, but to illuminate things engineers might otherwise take for granted. It's easy to forget how much unspoken cultural infrastructure supports what we call "information retrieval."

If a few comments dismiss that perspective as silly or unscientific, I don't take it personally. If anything, it reassures me I'm tapping into something unfamiliar but worth sharing and worth having deep discussion on.

Thanks again for engaging in good faith. That's the kind of exchange that makes this place valuable.

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

#278

Post by the_af »

mlmonge wrote: post #257
Terr_ wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes we anthropomorphize complex systems and it's not really a problem, like how water "tries" to flow downhill, or the printer "wants" cyan ink. It's how we signal there's sufficient complexity (or unknowns) that can be ignored or deferred. The problem arises when we apply this intuition to things where too many people in the audience might take it literally.

Even worse, IMHO... Are those who argue that LLMs an become sentient--I've seen this banter in other threads here on HN, in fact. As far as I understand it, sentience is a property organic to beings that can do more than just reason. These beings can contemplate on their existence, courageously seek & genuinely value relationship and worship their creator. And yes, I'm describing HUMANS. In spite of all the science f…

I don't believe LLMs have become sentient, nor can it "contemplate on its existence".

That said, I find some of your claims less compelling. I'm an atheist, so there's no "creator" for humans to be worshipped. But also, human intelligence/sentience came from non-intelligence/non-sentience, right? So something appeared where before it didn't exist (gradually, and with whatever convoluted and random accidents, but it did happen: something new where it didn't exist before). Therefore, it's not implausible that a new form of intelligence/sentience could be fast tracked again out of non-intelligence, especially if humans were directing its evolution.

By the way, not all scifi argues that machines/programs can evolve to develop humanity. Some scifi argues the contrary, and good scifi wonders "what makes us human?".

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

#279

Post by the_af »

duxup wrote: post #141
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…

The terminology is so confusing in AI right now. I use LLMs, I enjoy them, I'm more productive with them. Then I go read a blog from some AI devs and they use terms like "thinking" or similar terms. I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.

> I always have to ask "We're still s stringing words together with math right? Not really thinking right?" The answer is always yes ... but then they go back to using their wonky terms.

I think it still is, but it works way better than it has any right to, or that we would expect from the description "string words together with math".

So it's easy to understand people's confusion.

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

#280

Post by OkayPhysicist »

mlmonge wrote: post #257
Terr_ wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes we anthropomorphize complex systems and it's not really a problem, like how water "tries" to flow downhill, or the printer "wants" cyan ink. It's how we signal there's sufficient complexity (or unknowns) that can be ignored or deferred. The problem arises when we apply this intuition to things where too many people in the audience might take it literally.

Even worse, IMHO... Are those who argue that LLMs an become sentient--I've seen this banter in other threads here on HN, in fact. As far as I understand it, sentience is a property organic to beings that can do more than just reason. These beings can contemplate on their existence, courageously seek & genuinely value relationship and worship their creator. And yes, I'm describing HUMANS. In spite of all the science f…

See, I think your view is just as baseless as the people calling modern LLMs sentient. If I was to take a human, and gradual replace parts of him and his brain with electronics that simulated the behavior of the removed parts, I'd struggle to call that person not sentient. After all, is a deaf person who is given hearing by a cochlear implant "less sentient"? And if we were to skip the flesh part, and jump straight to building the resulting system, how could we not acknowledge that these two beings are not equals? We have no evidence whatsoever for anything at all so unique about oursleves that they could not be simulated. Hell, even a theological argument has issues: if God was able to create us in his image, complete with sentientience and humanity, what's to say we, too, can't so illuminate our own creations?

To claim we have already achieved machine sentience is preposterous hype swallowing. To assert that it is impossible is baseless conjecture.

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