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The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

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Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#61

Post by oreally »

vladms wrote: post #31

> Whether something is a forgery is innate in the object and the methods used to produce it. It doesn't matter if nobody else ever sees the forged painting, or if it only hangs in a private home. It's a forgery because it's not authentic. On a philosophical level I do not get the discussions about paintings. I love a painting for what it is not for being the first or the only one. An artist that paints something that…

> I would be curious how can this be applied to a human? Should we also cite all the courses, articles that we have read on a topic when we write code?

Yea this is the kind of BS and counter-productiveness that irrational radicals try to push the crowd towards.

The idea that one owns your observations of their work and can collect rent on it is absurd.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#62

Post by zorked »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #58
simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

Programmers aren't paid to code. FORTRAN ("formula translator") was one of the first programs ever written and it was supposed to make coding obsolete. Scientists will now be able to just type in formulas and the computer will just calculate the result, imagine that!

Is this claim historical? As in, it was actually made at the time?

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#63

Post by Underphil »

GaryBluto wrote: post #59

I think it says a lot about this opinion piece that the people agreeing with it are posting short comments saying "So true!" and "Great!" whilst the people criticizing it are writing paragraphs of well-spoken criticism.

Hardly surprising. Counterpoints are obviously going to be more detailed.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#64

Post by auggierose »

vjerancrnjak wrote: post #52
simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

Libraries create boundaries, which are in most cases arbitrary, that then limit the way you can interact with code, creating more boilerplate to get what you want from a library. Abstractions are the source of bloat. Without abstractions you can always reduce bloat, or you can reduce bloat in your glue, but you can't reduce glue. It takes discipline to NOT create arbitrary function signatures and short-lived intermed…

Yep, people not understanding the value of abstraction is exactly why LLM coded apps are going to be a shit show. You could use them to come up with better abstractions, but most will not.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#65

Post by delaminator »

theshrike79 wrote: post #41
raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

Also "AI" has been in gaming, especially mobile gaming, for a literal decade already. Household name game studios have had custom AI art asset tooling for a long time that can create art quickly, using their specific style. AI is a tool and as Steve Jobs said, you can hold it wrong. It's like plastic surgery, you only notice the bad ones and object to them. An expert might detect the better jobs, but the regular folk…

"I hate CGI video"

"So you hated the TV Series Ugly Betty then?"

"What? that's not CGI!"

This video is 15 years old

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjorAhcnbY

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#66

Post by phendrenad2 »

Sigh. Another one standing on the train tracks giving the approaching train a good scolding. First this article tries to equate AI-generated code with "forgery". Please, tell me how you "forge math". Next, it makes a little dig at senior engineers who use LLMs, because they must not realize that "every line of code is a liability". No no, senior engineers realize this, but they are also adept at observing successes and failures and coming up with a mental model for risk. That's part of keeping an application running, otherwise we'd all still be using jQuery and leftPad. We made the jump to react because we recognized that these NEW lines of code were far more valuable than their "liability". Somehow the author decided to store "liability" in a boolean. Oh, was AI involved, or is that a genuine human error..? Next the article makes a tired appeal to the fact that LLMs are trained on open-source code and are therefore "plagiarizing" this code constantly. This is where the train comes around the mountain. So when the AI generates Carmack's Reverse, is it plagiarizing Carmack or the book that he got the idea from? In what percentages? And what do I do with this valuable insight? Send Carmack $0.01 in an envelope for the privilege? In short, I don't know what the author wants, but I hope writing this helped.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#67

Post by vntok »

tovej wrote: post #53
raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong. I can type up what I want much faster and be sure it's at least solving the right problem, even if it may have bugs. There are also tools to generate boilerplate that work much much better than LLMs. And they're deterministic.

> An LLM has never saved me time. It has always produced something that doesn't quite work, has the rough shape of what I want, but somehow always gets all the details wrong.

This reads like a skill issue on your end, in part at least in the prompting side.

It does take time to reach a point where you can prompt an LLM sufficiently well to get a correct answer in one shot, developing an intuitive understanding of what absolutely needs to be written out and what can be inferred by the model.

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#68

Post by [deleted] »

raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

[deleted]

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#69

Post by heavyset_go »

simianwords wrote: post #29

What the author and many others find hard to digest is that LLMs are surfacing the reality that most of our work is a small bit of novelty against boiler plate redundant code. Most of what we do is programming is some small novel idea at high level and repeatable boilerplate at low level. A fair question is: why hasn’t the boilerplate been automated as libraries or other abstractions? LLMs are especially good at fuzz…

Books are just simple theses and themes with hundreds of pages of boilerplate

Re: The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

#70

Post by lxgr »

raincole wrote: post #34

> Video games stand out as one market where consumers have pushed back effectively No, it's simply untrue. Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious. No one cares about how the code is written. If you actually read the words used in Steam AI survey you'll know Steam has completely caved in for AI-gen code as well. It's specifically worded like this: > content such as artwork,…

> I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing.

People spin all kinds of things if they believe (accurately or not) that their livelihood is on the line. The knee-jerk "AI universally bad" movement seems just as absurd to me as the "AGI is already here" one.

> Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever.

Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation, seemed very soulless to me at the time.

As I see it, it's all a matter of how well it's executed. In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work (in the same way that e.g. renaissance artists didn't make every single brushstroke of their masterpieces themselves).

In the worst (or maybe even average? time will tell) case, there are only minimal human-made artistic decisions flowing into a work and the output is a mediocre average of everything that's already been done before, which is then rightfully perceived as slop.

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