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Four Fallacies of Modern AI

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Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#71

Post by Lerc »

I don't understand why people can't handle metaphors to explain things in AI so much.

The same terms exist in other fields. Physics has things that want to go to a lower energy level, the ball wants to fall but the table is holding it up. Electrons don't like being near each other, The hugs boson puts on little bunny ears and goes around giving mass to all the other good particles.

None of these are said in any way as a suggestion that these things have any form of intention.

They also don't in AI. When scientists really think those abilities are there in a provable way (or even if they suspect), I can assure you that they will be prepared to make it crystal clear that this is what they are claiming. Critisising the use of metaphor is kind of a pre-emptive attack against claims that might be made in the future.

Some AI scientists believe that there is a degree of awareness in recent models. They may be right or wrong but the ones who believe this are outright saying so.

I'm also inclined, if you'll excuse the term, to be critical of anything suggesting the assumption of smooth progress when they declare something to be the first step. Steps are not smooth. That's a good example of ignoring the what of the metaphor.

I don't really know what to make about the embodiment position, it feels like it's trying to hide dualism behind a practical limitation. Once you start drilling down into the why/why not and what do you mean by that, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the expectation that you can't train an AI because it doesn't have a soul

I agree with xkcd 1425 though.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#72

Post by ta20240528 »

keiferski wrote: post #31
ta20240528 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Language doesn't just describe reality; it creates it. I never under stand these kinds of statements. Does the sun not exist until we have a word for it, did "under the rock" not exist for dinosaurs?

I think create is the wrong word choice here. Shaping reality is a better one, as it doesn't hold the implication that before language, nothing existed. Think of it this way, though: the divisions that humans make between objects in the world are largely linguistic ones. For example, we say that the Earth is such-and-such an ecosystem with certain species occupying it. But this is more like a convenient shorthand, no…

> Property … Originally it's just a legal term

No, see what happens when apes, hyena's, and animals from dozens of other species try steal each others food.

"mine" and "yours" existed long before language.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#73

Post by DonaldFisk »

entropyneur wrote: post #18

This article seems to fall straight into the trap it aims to warn us about. All this talk about "true" understanding, embodiment, etc. is needless antropomorphizing. A much better framework for thinking about intelligence is simply as the ability to make predictions about the world (including conditional ones like "what will happen if we take this action"). Whether it's achieved through "true understanding" (however…

I think that intelligence requires, or rather, is the development and use of a model of the problem while the problem is being solved, i.e. it involves understanding the problem. Accurate predictions, based on extrapolations made by systems trained using huge quantities of data, are not enough.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#74

Post by keiferski »

ta20240528 wrote: post #72
keiferski wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think create is the wrong word choice here. Shaping reality is a better one, as it doesn't hold the implication that before language, nothing existed. Think of it this way, though: the divisions that humans make between objects in the world are largely linguistic ones. For example, we say that the Earth is such-and-such an ecosystem with certain species occupying it. But this is more like a convenient shorthand, no…

> Property … Originally it's just a legal term No, see what happens when apes, hyena's, and animals from dozens of other species try steal each others food. "mine" and "yours" existed long before language.

Sorry I should have been more specific. I meant privately owned land, not just personal property. You could argue that territorial “possession” of land is a thing animals have, but the concept of property goes considerably further than that IMO.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#75

Post by jokoon »

degamad wrote: post #10
jokoon wrote: post #9

Finally an insightful article about ai

It was, but it punted in the conclusion... > Mitchell in her paper compares modern AI to alchemy. It produces dazzling, impressive results but it often lacks a deep, foundational theory of intelligence. > It’s a powerful metaphor, but I think a more pragmatic conclusion is slightly different. The challenge isn't to abandon our powerful alchemy in search of a pure science of intelligence. But alchemy was wrong and cha…

There is always an "age of ignorance" that precedes an age of knowledge.

Alchemy helped to create chemistry. I think that's often how science works, the models improves over time.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#76

Post by ACCount37 »

Lerc wrote: post #71

I don't understand why people can't handle metaphors to explain things in AI so much. The same terms exist in other fields. Physics has things that want to go to a lower energy level, the ball wants to fall but the table is holding it up. Electrons don't like being near each other, The hugs boson puts on little bunny ears and goes around giving mass to all the other good particles. None of these are said in any way a…

It's AI effect let loose.

A lot of people really, really don't want LLMs to be "actually intelligent", so they oppose any use of any remotely "anthropomorphic" terms in application to LLMs on that principle alone.

IMO, anthropomorphizing LLMs is at least directionally correct in 9 cases out of 10.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#77

Post by cantor_S_drug »

adastra22 wrote: post #28
cantor_S_drug wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine LLM is conscious (as Anthropic wants us to believe). Imagine LLM is made to train on so much data which is far beyond what its parameter count allows for. Am I hurting the LLM by causing it intensive cognitive strain?

Why would that hurt?

You are made to memorize entire encyclopedia but you have biological limit of only 1000 facts.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#78

Post by ehnto »

peterashford wrote: post #49
_1tem wrote: post #42

I would add a fifth fallacy: assuming what we humans do can be reduced to “intelligence”. We are actually very irrational. Humans are driven strongly by Will, Desire, Love, Faith, and many other irrational traits. Has an LLM ever demonstrated irrational love? Or sexual desire? How can it possibly do what humans do without these?

Yeah I think that's an important dimension. David Hume said that there was no action without passion and I think that's a key difference with AIs. They sit there passive until we interact with them. They dont want anything, they dont have goals, desires, motivations. The emotional part of the human psyche does a lot of work - we aren't just calculating sums

The idea that any of those attributes could arise out of an LLM would be surprising to say the least. They do not maintain a continuum of thought for which those things could exist within. In the case of humans, those things are not just thought anyway, they are a complex mix of chemical signals, physical signals and thoughts, memories etc. So complex we barely understand it, even though we live it and have studied it for centuries.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#79

Post by esafak »

> The primary counterargument can be framed in terms of Rich Sutton's famous essay, "The Bitter Lesson," which argues that the entire history of AI has taught us that attempts to build in human-like cognitive structures (like embodiment) are always eventually outperformed by general methods that just leverage massive-scale computation.

That's not what it says, but that hand-made heuristics are defeated by general methods. There is no reason why the same methods should not perform even better when informed by data through interacting with the world.

Re: Four Fallacies of Modern AI

#80

Post by WithinReason »

AIPedant wrote: post #33
entropyneur wrote: post #18

This article seems to fall straight into the trap it aims to warn us about. All this talk about "true" understanding, embodiment, etc. is needless antropomorphizing. A much better framework for thinking about intelligence is simply as the ability to make predictions about the world (including conditional ones like "what will happen if we take this action"). Whether it's achieved through "true understanding" (however…

"Making predictions about the world" is a reductive and childish way to describe intelligence in humans. Did David Lynch make Mulholland Drive because he predicted it would be a good movie? The most depressing thing about AI summers is watching tech people cynically try to define intelligence downwards to excuse failures in current AI.

He was trying to predict what movie would create the desired reaction from his own brain. That's how creativity works, it's just prediction.
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