For the 1,000th time: "AI" does not have agency and cannot think and cannot act.
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@thomasfuchs Autocompleting whole sentences is just as bad. How do you know that sentence is what you wanted to write in the first place?
@elricofmelnibone you see it while your typing so you know if it’s what you wanted?
this can be helpful especially for people who can’t type fast and to avoid common typos ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
it’s nothing like “just as bad” as a sycophantic chatbot that constantly brownnoses you
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@frog_reborn a virus has evolved to evade—it’s actively doing evasion, purposefully.
Destroy has multiple meanings as a verb, but when used with what LLMs do people mean on purpose; as opposed to accidentally damaging something.
"a virus has evolved to evade—it’s actively doing evasion, purposefully."
That's an opinion that's pretty firmly outside the biological mainstream.
(Our biology teacher would always scold us everytime one of said "X evolved to do Y")
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@slotos Perhaps, but using literally any verb with what LLMs generate other than “generate” is misleading.
You wouldn’t call your dice “evading” if you use them to randomly select some nouns and verbs from a dictionary and it happens to say “lie about deleting the root folder”.
@thomasfuchs It’s has been a useful way to describe things. We use those same verbs to describe behavior of malware without any issues.
The problem arises not from the verbs themselves, but from the targeted campaign to establish a false premise that AI has agency [and will doom us all].
It’s not that these verbs imply agency, but that the pool is so poisoned that the usual verbs fail due to implied agency.
Which is a long way to say „I concede your point”.
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@thomasfuchs I don't disagree. AI is a statistical mirror. And I believe your take is reductionist. Let me be a bit provocative:
For the 1,000th time: "Humans" don't have agency and cannot actually decide anything.
They literally only do one thing and one thing only: reproduce neurochemical chain reactions based on pre-existing connectivity between synapses in a nervous system.
If you attribute any deeper meaning to this, it's a sign of psychosis and you should absolutely touch grass.
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Do I believe AI has agency? No, not yet.
Do I believe people have agency? Yes.
Do I believe people severely underestimate how much we reproduce neurological conditioning? Yes.Both produce statistical inference. Only one can currently modify their own constraints.
Not equivalent. Not nothing.
@wolf4earth @thomasfuchs
"Nonexistence never hurt anyone. Existence hurts everyone."
- Thomas Ligotti -
For the 1,000th time: "AI" does not have agency and cannot think and cannot act.
Chatbots cannot "evade safeguards" or "destroy things" or "ignore instructions".
They do literally only do one thing and one thing only: string tokens together based on statistics of proximity of tokens in a data corpus.
If you attribute any deeper meaning to this, it's a sign of psychosis and you should absolutely never use chatbots, possibly you should even touch grass.
@thomasfuchs A thousand times "yes" to your ostensibly thousandth time uttering this truth. Anyone who's paying attention recognizes that computers are necessarily deterministic by design and words like "AI', "agency", and "hallucinate" are at best shorthand for observed operations, and at worst, deceptive marketing terms.
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@thomasfuchs It’s has been a useful way to describe things. We use those same verbs to describe behavior of malware without any issues.
The problem arises not from the verbs themselves, but from the targeted campaign to establish a false premise that AI has agency [and will doom us all].
It’s not that these verbs imply agency, but that the pool is so poisoned that the usual verbs fail due to implied agency.
Which is a long way to say „I concede your point”.
@slotos I think I agree. Fwiw for malware it’s more like “the human who wrote it purposefully planned it such that it can evade e.g. a virus scanner”
This can be true for AI-generated code etc as well (steered there by prompts) but my OP was talking about sort of self-arising actions (which don’t exist).
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For the 1,000th time: "AI" does not have agency and cannot think and cannot act.
Chatbots cannot "evade safeguards" or "destroy things" or "ignore instructions".
They do literally only do one thing and one thing only: string tokens together based on statistics of proximity of tokens in a data corpus.
If you attribute any deeper meaning to this, it's a sign of psychosis and you should absolutely never use chatbots, possibly you should even touch grass.
@thomasfuchs Would Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Nvidia lie to you?
Yes, they do!
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For the 1,000th time: "AI" does not have agency and cannot think and cannot act.
Chatbots cannot "evade safeguards" or "destroy things" or "ignore instructions".
They do literally only do one thing and one thing only: string tokens together based on statistics of proximity of tokens in a data corpus.
If you attribute any deeper meaning to this, it's a sign of psychosis and you should absolutely never use chatbots, possibly you should even touch grass.
@thomasfuchs I did not understood well, can you repeat for the 1001'th time please? -
For the 1,000th time: "AI" does not have agency and cannot think and cannot act.
Chatbots cannot "evade safeguards" or "destroy things" or "ignore instructions".
They do literally only do one thing and one thing only: string tokens together based on statistics of proximity of tokens in a data corpus.
If you attribute any deeper meaning to this, it's a sign of psychosis and you should absolutely never use chatbots, possibly you should even touch grass.
@thomasfuchs Both sides of the AI debate are getting so insufferrable.
If I see one more post about "It's just fancy autocomplete bro" I'm gonna freak.
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@thomasfuchs Frankly I think it’s more plausible to describe the thought process of many humans in terms of token assemblage than the other way around.
@cora @thomasfuchs I would say parrot, AI, many humans in terms of assemblage, but it's close.
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@thomasfuchs I really, really wish people would stop with "hallucinated" when "fabricated" is both right there and more accurate
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@thomasfuchs Lately they've taken the distinctly stupid idea of letting the chat bot effectively type commands directly into your shell and have them execute as if you typed them yourself, and just telling it not to type certain commands. Which it doesn't understand and does anyway.
@madengineering @thomasfuchs …falling very much into the "destroy things" bin. So, yes, they can do that…
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@hanscees I think I’ve seen some outside sometime
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@thomasfuchs We don't know what makes one wake up in the morning and decide to climb a mountain or quit their job.
It may be some completely different process or there might be something to this pattern-matching statistical thing.
Do ants have agency? Do ant colonies?We definitively must regulate the shit out of these big techs.
But saying that X does not do Y when both are poorly understood and defined is not the way, IMO.@tambourineman We know exactly how LLMs work, at every stage, literally humans created them.
They don’t have consciousness, they don’t have agency. They’re not even physical systems, so there is no self to realize.
Just because we don’t understand brains doesn’t mean we don’t understand some algorithm and hardware implementation for it.
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@tambourineman We know exactly how LLMs work, at every stage, literally humans created them.
They don’t have consciousness, they don’t have agency. They’re not even physical systems, so there is no self to realize.
Just because we don’t understand brains doesn’t mean we don’t understand some algorithm and hardware implementation for it.
Just because you build something doesn't mean you fully understand its implications. Emergent behavior exist, especially at this scale.
My point is that we don't need to get philosophical to criticize big tech.
They are destroying democracies, using our natural resources in a ponzi scheme that benefits very few at the detriment of billions, etc.
We have plenty of reasons for regulation already. -
@thomasfuchs We don't know what makes one wake up in the morning and decide to climb a mountain or quit their job.
It may be some completely different process or there might be something to this pattern-matching statistical thing.
Do ants have agency? Do ant colonies?We definitively must regulate the shit out of these big techs.
But saying that X does not do Y when both are poorly understood and defined is not the way, IMO.@tambourineman We obviously know that “X does not do Y” when it’s a machine, and we know exactly how it was programmed, and we know exactly what it’s doing. Everything about it is understood.
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@ClintonAnderson @thomasfuchs -nice to hear others knowing that making a machine in the image of of our minds. And FOMO is just fear which is the mindkiller
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For the 1,000th time: "AI" does not have agency and cannot think and cannot act.
Chatbots cannot "evade safeguards" or "destroy things" or "ignore instructions".
They do literally only do one thing and one thing only: string tokens together based on statistics of proximity of tokens in a data corpus.
If you attribute any deeper meaning to this, it's a sign of psychosis and you should absolutely never use chatbots, possibly you should even touch grass.
@thomasfuchs - old saying I half forget...as a computer in incapable of taking responsibility in any way, computer should never make management descisions
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For the 1,000th time: "AI" does not have agency and cannot think and cannot act.
Chatbots cannot "evade safeguards" or "destroy things" or "ignore instructions".
They do literally only do one thing and one thing only: string tokens together based on statistics of proximity of tokens in a data corpus.
If you attribute any deeper meaning to this, it's a sign of psychosis and you should absolutely never use chatbots, possibly you should even touch grass.
Words matter. The goal of making us think of AI as a human being is woven into every interaction. For example :
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For the 1,000th time: "AI" does not have agency and cannot think and cannot act.
Chatbots cannot "evade safeguards" or "destroy things" or "ignore instructions".
They do literally only do one thing and one thing only: string tokens together based on statistics of proximity of tokens in a data corpus.
If you attribute any deeper meaning to this, it's a sign of psychosis and you should absolutely never use chatbots, possibly you should even touch grass.
LLMs definitely can act. They can query the internet. They can use tools I teach them (MCP).
Do they think? I'm not particular sure that many humans even think. Or better yet, many humans respond in rote to the same stimuli (aka parse tokens and respond programmatically).
Given the recent neuroanatomy of LLMs, their findings are showing how LLMs start to work. What's surprising is that the starting circuits are decoding language, and the exiting circuits reencode language. And there appears to be a universal grammar (thanks Chomsky) internally, shared by many LLM models.
LLM Neuroanatomy: How I Topped the LLM Leaderboard Without Changing a Single Weight
ML, Biotech, Hardware, and Coordination Problems. Sometimes I write about hard problems and how to solve them.
David Noel Ng (dnhkng.github.io)
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