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What happens when people don't understand how AI works

theatlantic.com

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

#281

Post by Kim_Bruning »

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…

Just to be sure:

Sure: the Oracle of Delphi did have this entire mystic front end they laundered their research output through (presumably because powerpoint wasn't invented yet). Ultimately though, they were really the original McKinsey.

They had an actual research network that did the grunt work. They'd never have been so successful if the system didn't do some level of work.

I know you tripped on this accidentally, but it might yet have some bearing on this conversation. Look at the history of Ethology: It started with people assuming animals were automatons that couldn't think. Now we realize that many are 'alien' intelligences, with clear indicators of consciousness. We need to proceed carefully either way and build understanding, not reject hypotheses out-of-hand.

https://aeon.co/ideas/delphic-priestesses-the-worlds-first-p... (for an introduction to the concept)

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

#282

Post by the_af »

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…

> 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

The "pop culture" interpretation of Turing Test, at least, seems very insufficient to me. It relies on human perception rather than on any algorithmic or AI-like achievement. Humans are very adept at convincing themselves non-sentient things are sentient. The most crude of stochastic parrots can fool many humans, your "average human".

If I remember correctly, ELIZA -- which is very crude by today's standards -- could fool some humans.

I don't think this weak interpretation of the Turing Test (which I know is not exactly what Alan Turing proposed) is at all sufficient.

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

#284

Post by Bootvis »

zeknife wrote: post #274
bsoles wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I too am never surprised by my brains narration but: Maybe the brain tricks you in never being surprised and acting like your thoughts are following a perfectly sensible sequence.

It would be incredibly tedious to be surprised every 5 seconds.

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

#285

Post by Lerc »

acdha wrote: post #234
pmdr wrote: post #222

> Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble, proclaimed last year that the platform may soon allow users to automate dating itself, disrupting old-fashioned human courtship by providing them with an AI “dating concierge” that will interact with other users’ concierges until the chatbots find a good fit. > Herd doubled down on these claims in a lengthy New York Times interview last month. Seriously, wha…

Her problem is that BMBL is down 92% and they need to tell investors that they’ll all be rich again: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BMBL/ Most of the dumb AI pitches share that basic goal: someone is starting from what investors want to be true and using “AI” like it’s a magic spell which can make that possible, just as we’ve seen going back to the dawn of the web. Sober voices don't get attention because it’s borin…

I haven't seen any measure of how frequent these dumb ideas are. Certainly they exist, but what proportion of AI startups are like these cases that turn up in the media as AI disasters.

It's kind of hard to tell with some ideas that they are actually dumb ideas until they have been tried an failed. A few ideas that seem dumb when suggested turn out to be reasonable when tried. Quite a few are revealed to be just as dumb as they looked.

Thinking about it like that actually more comfortable with the idea of investors putting money into dumb ideas, They have taken responsibility for deciding for themselves how dumb they think something might be. It's their money (even if I do have issues with the mechanisms that allowed them to acquire it), let them spend it on things that they feel might possibly work.

I think there should be a distinction made between dumb seeming ideas and deception though. Saying 'I think people will want this' or 'I think AI can solve this problem' is a very different thing to manufacturing data to say "people want this", or telling people a problem has been solved when it hasn't. There's probably too much of this, and I doubt it is limited to AI startups, or even Startups of any kind. There are probably quite a few 'respectable' seeming companies that are, from time to time, prepared to fudge data to make it seem that some of the problems ahead of them are already behind them.

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

#286

Post by Kim_Bruning »

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…

Oh, that's a very important point. Yeah, we definitely want to educate the people around us that these tools/agents are very new technology and far from perfect (and definitely not anything like traditional computation)

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

#289

Post by ineedasername »

So many of these articles jump around to incredibly different concerns or research questions. This one raises plenty of important questions but threads a narrative through them that attempts to lump it all as a single issue.

Just to start off with, saying LLM models are "not smart" and "don't/won't/can't understand" ... That is really not a useful way to begin any conversation about this. To "understand" is itself a word without, in this context, any useful definition that would allow evaluation of models against it. It's this imprecision that is at the root of so much hand wringing and frustration by everyone.

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

#290

Post by fragmede »

hapali wrote: post #46
andy99 wrote: post #18

I agree with the substance, but would argue the author fails to "understand how AI works" in an important way: LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another Modern chat-tuned LLMs are not simply statistical models trained on web scale datasets.…

More accurately: Modern chat-oriented LLMs are not simply statistical models trained on web scale datasets. Instead, they are the result of a two-stage process: first, large-scale pretraining on internet data, and then extensive fine-tuning through human feedback. Much of what makes these models feel responsive, safe, or emotionally intelligent is the outcome of thousands of hours of human annotation, often performed…

> and then extensive fine-tuning through human feedback

how extensive is the work involved to take a model that's willing to talk about Tianamen square into one that isn't? What's involved with editing Llama to tell me how to make cocaine/bombs/etc?

It's not so extensive so as to require an army of subcontractors to provide large scale human feedback.

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