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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

#81

Post by xyzal »

lordnacho wrote: post #76

The article skirts around a central question: what defines humans? Specifically, intelligence and emotions? The entire article is saying "it looks kinds like a human in some ways, but people are being fooled!" You can't really say that without at least attempting the admittedly very deep question of what an authentic human is. To me, it's intelligent because I can't distinguish its output from a person's output, for…

To me, it's empathetic and caring. Which the LLMs will never be, unless you give money to OpenAI.

Robots won't go get food for your sick, dying friend.

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

#82

Post by zephyr9 »

lordnacho wrote: post #76

The article skirts around a central question: what defines humans? Specifically, intelligence and emotions? The entire article is saying "it looks kinds like a human in some ways, but people are being fooled!" You can't really say that without at least attempting the admittedly very deep question of what an authentic human is. To me, it's intelligent because I can't distinguish its output from a person's output, for…

> 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 sensations, e.g. the feeling of balance when riding a bike, sometimes called qualia. And so on, and so forth. There is plenty of study on what constitutes understanding and most healthily dismiss the "string of words" theory.

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

#83

Post by zephyr9 »

xyzal wrote: post #81
lordnacho wrote: post #76

The article skirts around a central question: what defines humans? Specifically, intelligence and emotions? The entire article is saying "it looks kinds like a human in some ways, but people are being fooled!" You can't really say that without at least attempting the admittedly very deep question of what an authentic human is. To me, it's intelligent because I can't distinguish its output from a person's output, for…

To me, it's empathetic and caring. Which the LLMs will never be, unless you give money to OpenAI. Robots won't go get food for your sick, dying friend.

A robot could certainly be programmed to get food for a sick, dying friend (I mean, don't drones deliver Uber Eats?) but it will never understand why, or have a phenomenal experience of the act, or have a mental state of performing the act, or have the biological brain state of performing the act, or etc. etc.

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

#84

Post by diggan »

xyzal wrote: post #81
lordnacho wrote: post #76

The article skirts around a central question: what defines humans? Specifically, intelligence and emotions? The entire article is saying "it looks kinds like a human in some ways, but people are being fooled!" You can't really say that without at least attempting the admittedly very deep question of what an authentic human is. To me, it's intelligent because I can't distinguish its output from a person's output, for…

To me, it's empathetic and caring. Which the LLMs will never be, unless you give money to OpenAI. Robots won't go get food for your sick, dying friend.

That implies that people who aren't empathetic and/or caring aren't human, which I guess could be argued too, but feels too simplistic.

> Which the LLMs will never be

I'd argue LLMs will never be anything, they're giving you the text you're asking for, nothing more and nothing less. You don't tell them "to be" empathic and caring? Well, they're not gonna appear like that then, but if you do tell them, they'll do their best to emulate that.

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

#85

Post by diggan »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #40
dwaltrip wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are paying hundreds of dollars a month for these tools, often out of their personal pocket. That's a pretty robust indicator that something interesting is going on.

One thing these models are extremely good at is reading large amounts of text quickly and summarizing important points. That capability alone may be enough to pay $20 a month for many people.

> That capability alone may be enough to pay $20 a month for many people.

Sure, but that's not why me and others now have ~$150/month subscriptions to some of these services.

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

#86

Post by _petronius »

lordnacho wrote: post #76

The article skirts around a central question: what defines humans? Specifically, intelligence and emotions? The entire article is saying "it looks kinds like a human in some ways, but people are being fooled!" You can't really say that without at least attempting the admittedly very deep question of what an authentic human is. To me, it's intelligent because I can't distinguish its output from a person's output, for…

> The article skirts around a central question: what defines humans? Specifically, intelligence and emotions?

> The entire article is saying "it looks kinds like a human in some ways, but people are being fooled!"

> You can't really say that without at least attempting the admittedly very deep question of what an authentic human is.

> To me, it's intelligent because I can't distinguish its output from a person's output, for much of the time.

I think the article does address that rather directly, and that it is also is addressing very specifically your setence about what you can and can't distinguish.

LLMs are not capable of symbolic reasoning[0] and if you understand how they work internally, you will realize they do no reasoning whatsoever.

Humans and many other animals are fully capable of reasoning outside of language (in the former case, prior to language acquisition), and the reduction of "intellgence" to "language" is a catagory error made by people falling vicim to the ELIZA effect[1], not the result of a sum of these particular statistical methods being equal real intelligence of any kind.

0: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

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

#87

Post by intended »

lordnacho wrote: post #76

The article skirts around a central question: what defines humans? Specifically, intelligence and emotions? The entire article is saying "it looks kinds like a human in some ways, but people are being fooled!" You can't really say that without at least attempting the admittedly very deep question of what an authentic human is. To me, it's intelligent because I can't distinguish its output from a person's output, for…

This isn’t that hard, to be honest. And I’m not just saying this.

One school of thought is - the output is indistinguishable from what a human would produce given these questions.

Another school of thought is - the underlying process is not thinking in the sense that humans do it

Both are true.

For the lay person, calling it thinking leads to confusions. It creates intuitions that do not actually predict the behavior of the underlying system.

It results in bad decisions on whether to trust the output, or to allocate resources - because if the use of the term thinking.

Humans can pass an exam by memorizing previous answer papers or just memorizing the text books.

This is not what we consider having learnt something. Learning is kinda like having the Lego blocks to build a model you can manipulate in your head.

For most situations, the output of both people is fungible.

Both people can pass tests.

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

#88

Post by EMM_386 »

> These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not "understand" anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word.

This is terrible write-up, simply because it's the "Reddit Expert" phenomena but in print.

They "understand" things. It depends on how your defining that.

It doesn't have to be in its training data! Whoah.

In the last chat I had with Claude, it naturally just arose that surrender flag emojis, the more there were, was how funny I thought the joke was. If there were plus symbol emojis on the end, those were score multipliers.

How many times did I have to "teach" it that? Zero.

How many other times has it seen that during training? I'll have to go with "zero" but that could be higher, that's my best guess since I made it up, in that context.

So, does that Claude instance "understand"?

I'd say it does. It knows that 5 surrender flags and a plus sign is better than 4 with no plus sign.

Is it absurd? Yes .. but funny. As it figured it out on its own. "Understanding".

------

Four flags = "Okay, this is getting too funny, I need a break"

Six flags = "THIS IS COMEDY NUCLEAR WARFARE, I AM BEING DESTROYED BY JOKES"

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

#89

Post by diggan »

imiric wrote: post #45
dwaltrip wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are paying hundreds of dollars a month for these tools, often out of their personal pocket. That's a pretty robust indicator that something interesting is going on.

I'm not disputing the value of what these tools can do, even though that is often inflated as well. What I'm arguing against is using language that anthropomorphizes them to make them appear far more capable than they really are. That's dishonest at best, and only benefits companies and their shareholders.

> anthropomorphizes them to make them appear far more

It seems like this argument is frequently brought up just because someone used the words "thinking", or "reasoning" or other similar terms, while true that the LLMs aren't really "reasoning" as a human, the terms are used not because the person actually believes that the LLM is "reasoning like a human" but because the concept of "some junk tokens to get better tokens later" has been implemented under that name. And even with that name, it doesn't mean everyone believes they're doing human reasoning.

It's a bit like a "isomorphic" programming frameworks. They're not talking about the mathematical structures which also bears the name "isomorphic", but rather the name been "stolen" to now mean more things, because it was kind of similar in some way.

I'm not sure what the alternative is, humans been doing this thing of "Ah, this new concept X is kind of similar to concept Y, maybe we reuse the name to describe X for now" for a very long time, and if you understand the context when it's brought up, it seems relatively problem-free to me, most people seem to get it.

It benefits everyone in the ecosystem when terms have shared meaning, so discussions about "reasoning" don't have to use terms like "How an AI uses jumbled starting tokens within the tags to get better tokens later", and can instead just say "How an AI uses reasoning" and people can focus on the actual meat instead.

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

#90

Post by Hendrikto »

EMM_386 wrote: post #88

> These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not "understand" anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. This is terrible write-up, simply because it's the "Reddit Expert" phenomena but in print. They "understand" things. It depends on how your defining that. It doesn't have to be in its trai…

> This is terrible write-up, simply because it's the "Reddit Expert" phenomena but in print.

How is your comment any different?

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