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ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

biblioracle.substack.com

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Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#51

Post by moffkalast »

globnomulous wrote: post #42
throw310822 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are token predictors. That's all they do. You certainly understand that if they can successfully predict the tokens that a great poet, a great scientist or a great philosopher would write, then everything changes- starting from our status of sole, and rare, generators of intelligent thoughts and clever artifacts.

Congratulations, you've successfully solved the Chinese Room problem by paving over and ignoring it.

I think the Chinese room is actually correct. The CUDA cores running a model don't understand anything, the neuron cells in our brain don't understand anything either.

Where inteligence actually lies is in the process itself, the interactions of the entire chaotic system brought all together to create something more than the sum of its parts. Humans get continuous consciousness given our analog hardware, digital only gets momentary bursts of it when each feedforward is ran.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#52

Post by ludicrousdispla »

simonw wrote: post #3

The original story here was published on December 11th 2022, just 12 days after the launch of ChatGPT (running on GPT-3.5). I feel most of this document (the bit that evaluates examples of ChatGPT output) is more of historic interest than a useful critique of the state of LLMs in 2025.

This document is not a critique on the state of LLMs.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#53

Post by globnomulous »

grumbel wrote: post #49
globnomulous wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations, you've successfully solved the Chinese Room problem by paving over and ignoring it.

See System Reply, the Chinese Room is a pseudo problem begging the question rooted in nothing more than human exceptionalism. If you start with the assumption that humans are the only thing in the universe able to "understand" (whatever that means), then of course the room can't understand (except for every reasonable definition of "understanding" it does).

It isn't a pseudo problem. In this case, it's a succinct statement of exactly the issue you're ignoring, namely the fact that great poets have minds and intentions that we understand. LLMs are language calculators. As I said elsewhere in this thread, if you don't already see the difference, nothing I say here is going to convince you otherwise.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#54

Post by briandear »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #27

If this argument is true it implies an unintended but very bleak corollary about what things aren't really worth preserving, if you start to think about what things aren't thriving in the economy with competition from LLMs. Trusted phone communication, visual art, rule of law, academic peer review, the news, search engines, question and answer platforms, etc

Academic peer review? That system can go away. I care about facts and proof of those facts, I don’t care about some academic’s opinion of another academic’s paper. We have t solved for the alternative yet, but peer review has led us to some ridiculous unscientific dishonesty, a reproducibility crises, and other adventurers because we assume the peers have an incentive for truth.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#55

Post by wruza »

dist-epoch wrote: post #20
knowknow wrote: post #6

It’s always baffling how people take a technology that wasn’t even thought as feasible a decade ago and try to dismiss it as trivial and stagnant. It’s pretty clear that LLMs have improved rapidly and have successfully become better writers than the majority of people alive. To try and present this as just random pattern matching seems as just a way to assuage fears of being replaced. It’s also amusing that people mi…

> amusing that people minimize it by just calling it pattern matching Even funnier when the typical IQ test, Raven's Progressive Matrices, are 100% about pattern matching.

I once tried myself on an official Mensa test which was very similar to that. It got very boring after I realized they test for mundane & | ^ in varying ways. Dropped it halfway and passed, lol. But I guess you have to be pretty smart to detect logical ops without a hacker background.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#56

Post by globnomulous »

grumbel wrote: post #49
globnomulous wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations, you've successfully solved the Chinese Room problem by paving over and ignoring it.

See System Reply, the Chinese Room is a pseudo problem begging the question rooted in nothing more than human exceptionalism. If you start with the assumption that humans are the only thing in the universe able to "understand" (whatever that means), then of course the room can't understand (except for every reasonable definition of "understanding" it does).

And System Reply, too, ignores the central problem: the man in the room does not understand Chinese.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#57

Post by briandear »

zadler wrote: post #30

Maybe this is propaganda and you are being told what to think. Of course AI isn’t going to be a good thing for the majority of humans at all. But it’s very important to manage sentiment within tech audiences.

Luddites would have argued that textile machinery isn’t going to be a good thing for the majority of humans at all.

And they were wrong.

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#58

Post by [deleted] »

IanCal wrote: post #33
globnomulous wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To try and present this as just random pattern matching seems as just a way to assuage fears of being replaced. LLMs are token predictors. That's all they do. This certainly isn't "random," but insisting that that's what the technology does isn't some sad psychological defense mechanism. It's a statement of fact. > as if human reasoning isn’t built upon recognizing patterns in past experiences. Everybody will be re…

Prediction is not the same as pattern matching.

[deleted]

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#59

Post by wruza »

globnomulous wrote: post #39
raducu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are token predictors. And neural nets are "just" matrix multiplications, human brains are "just" chemical reactions

I don't know why you're quoting, or stressing, a word I didn't use. I once got into an argument with a date about the existence of God and the soul. She asked whether I really think we're "just" physical stuff. I told her, "no, I'm not saying we're 'just' physical stuff. I'm saying we're physical stuff." That 'just' is simply a statement of how she feels about the idea, not a criticism of what I was claiming. I don't…

“That’s all they do” and “just” are interchangeable. All you do is transferring electric charges across synapses, and all molecules do is bouncing off each other, but this reduction doesn’t explain neither thinking nor flying. In this case you’re saying “That’s all they do”, which means “just” to others.

Don’t even try to argue, cause all I do is typing letters and you’ll only get more letters in response ;)

Re: ChatGPT can't kill anything worth preserving

#60

Post by grumbel »

globnomulous wrote: post #53
grumbel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See System Reply, the Chinese Room is a pseudo problem begging the question rooted in nothing more than human exceptionalism. If you start with the assumption that humans are the only thing in the universe able to "understand" (whatever that means), then of course the room can't understand (except for every reasonable definition of "understanding" it does).

It isn't a pseudo problem. In this case, it's a succinct statement of exactly the issue you're ignoring, namely the fact that great poets have minds and intentions that we understand. LLMs are language calculators. As I said elsewhere in this thread, if you don't already see the difference, nothing I say here is going to convince you otherwise.

Define "intentions" and "understand" in a way that is testable. All you are doing here is employing intuition pumps without actually saying anything.

> LLMs are language calculators.

And humans are just chemical reactions. That's completely irrelevant to the topic, as both can still act as Universal Turing machine just the same.

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