Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chumbawamba made me unable to take anything associated with him seriously.
He was arguably the most successful UK PM of the last 50 years.
I think I could agree with that, until the Iraq war.
AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost
61–70 of 103 posts
Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost
#62There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…
It's surprising to me that the big labs haven't fixed this problem. Half the comments here are complaining that this article is egregious unreadable slop, and I agree. Surely with the trillions of investment they could at least figure out how to vary sentence structure a bit and nix obvious tells.
Maybe this is just an inherent problem with LLMs.
Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost
#63There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…
> Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind their words.
I think this is at least in part a combination of rosy retrospection and attentional bias: A lot of human writing was always trash. Absolute dogshit with regard to the quality of writing, but there was no "AI slop" label to attach to it. How would you, pre-LLMs, have placed a comment on the writing style if a post was badly written? From what I've seen it would be a "this is marketing/SEO-speak" or some similar comment, deriding the author for being uninformed or of ill intent.
We've now become so allergic to AI slop that anything that even smells like it triggers almost immediate disgust and attachment of that label to the content (even if it is the same old human written trash).
I guess LLM-assisted posts do change the dynamic a bit: the intent is more often benign with a desire to write something good, but the skill to do so lacking. If we limit the "pre-LLM authors" to people with good intent writing about stuff relevant to a HackerNews audience, you're probably right. Many more bad writers are now creating the same ostensibly fancy articles, decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio we were used.
Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost
#64Did no one think of offering it a nice game of chess?
Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost
#65Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost
#66Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost
#67There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…
This problem actually surfaces in movies too, for A to happen B has to happen, but B has no reason to happen so you end up with non sensensical situations. This happens in llms as well since A is explained by B happening, but A doesn't need to be explained since A can't happen.
Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost
#68There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…
This and the fact that you often read a sentence, paragraph or the whole article, and think this said absolutely nothing in lots of words.
That is also true of a lot of pre-2023, so most likely human penned, writing.
LLMs seem to emulate bad (or even "meh") writing well but, without a human editor making significant tweaks, have yet to excel at good writing.
I've been incorrectly identified as an LLM before now because my writing is sometimes bad and falls into the tropes now associated with generative AI (“not this, but that”, being overly wordy, appearing to lack focus, etc).
Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost
#69[flagged]
Could you elaborate on the racial mixing point? I'm not quite sure what you mean
Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost
#70Kind of grim that this level of analysis is informing UK government policy. Repeatedly, the AI doesn't have the information or access needed through his hacky vibe-coded MCP, and instead of abandoning his flawed artificial test scenario (or fixing it — finding or building a better one) he gives it a name "The sensorium effect" and treats this as some brilliant insight. Both humans and AI struggle to make sound choice…
Exactly this, he should've just fixed this, or not written an article about it.
After the 'sensorium effect' (he should've used ancient greek for a +10 bonus to archaic intellectual points), he describes the 'knowledge-doing gap'. i.e. the AI reasons it needs to build X, logs this for 110 turns in a row, but doesn't do it. It doesn't actually specify why not, and whether it is again a limitation of his MCP implementation. If the AI articulates it must do it like the author says, but decides not to, either it doesn't think it must do it, or it does think it must but somehow can't technically execute its own decisions, it can't be anything else.
In fact in the context of 'advising the UK government', this 'knowledge-doing gap' I assume is a technical limitation, is entirely moot. For the cost of 0.00001% of the UK's government you could just hire a human being to execute that which the AI articulates. I'm curious what the results would be if he just did a manual execution of the AI's articulated actions would be.
The fact he doesn't go in to this but just keeps repeating examples of this makes it a pointless article.