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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

#321

Post by hackinthebochs »

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.

I never miss a chance to reference this video. A woman vividly describes he experience of not having an inner monologue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u69YSh-cFXY

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

#322

Post by martindbp »

beardedwizard wrote: post #150
martindbp wrote: post #108

Many people who claim that people don't understand how AI works often have a very simplified view of the short comings of LLMs themselves, e.g. "it's just predicting the next token", "it's just statistics", "stochastic parrot" and seems to be grounded in what AI was 2-3 years ago. Rarely have they actually read the recent research on interpretability. It's clear LLMs are doing more than just pattern matching. They ma…

Apple recently published a paper that seems to disagree and plainly states it's just pattern matching along with tests to prove it. https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think...

Anthropic has done much more in depth research actually introspecting the circuits: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...

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

#324

Post by zephyr9 »

benjismith wrote: post #273
zephyr9 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gravitationa…

That’s interesting. I thought your cat analogy (which I really liked) was going to be an example of how LLMs do not have understanding the way a cat understands the skill of jumping. But then you went the other way.

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

#325

Post by namaria »

FabHK wrote: post #314
spacemadness wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or saying they’re close to AGI because LLM behavior is indistinguishable from thinking to them. Especially here on HN I see “what’s the difference?” arguments all the time. It looks like it to me so it must be it. QED.

> Especially here on HN I see “what’s the difference?” arguments all the time. It looks like it to me so it must be it. QED. To be fair, the Turing Test (a human observer interacting with two terminals, one with a human at the other end, one with an AI, and the human not being reliably able to tell which one is the AI) has long been seen as the operationalization of the concept of general intelligence. In other words…

You should read the original paper. Turing argued that discussing the abilities of machines to "think" is meaningless and proposes instead to conjecture about whether a digital computer would eventually be able to imitate conversation.

I think time has proved that he was right. It is meaningless to discuss things like "Artificial Intelligence". We can only discuss machines in terms of performance, not in terms of subjectivity. Whenever we try to do the latter, we end up in a semantic quagmire.

This is the main reason I find the current hype irksome. The performance of machines should be evaluated objectively and in terms of the jobs they need to perform. Attributing 'intelligence' or 'thought' to machines is indeed absurd.

The 'imitation game' argument is categorically not that 'if machines appear to be intelligent they in fact are'. What it really is: 'machines cannot think obviously, but what could they do that currently requires a thinking human to be in charge?'.

75 years after Turing published the relevant paper, people are still doing what he called absurd (trying to attribute thought and intelligence to machines), and quoting him to do it. The main insight, that this is a category error and we should look objectively at what jobs need to be performed and how to implement it, is completely lost.

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

#327

Post by Hendrikto »

EMM_386 wrote: post #100
Hendrikto wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is terrible write-up, simply because it's the "Reddit Expert" phenomena but in print. How is your comment any different?

Because I provided evidence? And made the relevant point that I need know what you mean by "understanding"? The only 2 things in the universe that know that 6 is the maximum white flag emojis for jokes, and then might be modified by plus signs is ... My brain, and that digital instance of Claude AI, in that context. That's it - 2. And I didn't teach it, it picked it up. So if that's not "understanding" what is it? Th…

> Because I provided evidence?

No, you provided an anecdote. And then you interpreted a lot into very little.

> I don't see how laying out logically like this makes me the "Reddit Expert", sort of the opposite.

Selling anecdotes as evidence and flimsy interpretations as facts, and making unfounded statements like

> The only 2 things in the universe that know that 6 is the maximum white flag emojis for jokes, and then might be modified by plus signs is ...

> My brain, and that digital instance of Claude AI

is exactly my definition of a Reddit Expert.

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

#329

Post by munksbeer »

zahlman wrote: post #270
AlecSchueler wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't need to be able to qualify it. It's clearly different. I must believe this to function, because otherwise there is no reason to do anything, to make any decision - in turn because there is no justification to believe that I am actually "making decisions" in any meaningful sense. It boils down to belief in free will.

You should read "What's Expected Of Us" by Ted Chiang. Or perhaps you already have. It explores exactly this concept.

For what it's worth, I don't believe we have what people would call free will. Our brains operate either in an entirely deterministic universe, in which case everything was decided and your choices are not in any sense free, or we're in a universe with intrinsic randomness, and randomness doesn't make free will either.

I'm aware of the philosophy of Compatibilism, but this is just a sleight of hand to keep believing in some undefinable concept of free will.

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

#330

Post by munksbeer »

freejazz wrote: post #190
AlecSchueler wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually the point I was making. There's an assumption that the LLM is working differently because there's a statistical model but we lack the understanding of our own intelligence to be able to say this is indeed a difference.

So? There is no more evidence to suggest they are the same than what you've already rejected here as evidencing difference.

To me a more interesting observation, one that is already discussed a lot, is that if eventually we cannot tell the difference between a machine and a human in terms of output, then when do we accept that "thinking" has subjective, rather than objective?
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