LLM advocates still don’t seem to be able to comprehend that ordering the machine not to ‘make stuff up’ doesn’t help.

[gbargoud@masto.nyc]

@benjamineskola

Any LLM output that takes more than a few seconds of low mental effort to check (so anything more than a line or two of tab complete in a strongly typed coding language in an IDE with built in error underlining) makes me want to throw my computer out of the window.

I don't know how some people use it to generate a whole paragraph let alone multiple.

[mdione@en.osm.town]

@michaelgemar @solonovamax @benjamineskola I'm trying to convert my suddenly boss obsessed with our overlords pushing AI down our throats to at least use AI not as process but to at least write crappy but deterministic code

[michaelgemar@cosocial.ca]

@benjamineskola @solonovamax I’m sure that there is genuine utility in LLMs and the newer approaches to AI in general. But too many people are being led astray by LLMs intentional appearance of mentality so that they interact with them as people, as having understanding. That is wrong and risks terrible errors in the final product.

[sherapantsuit@mastodon.social]

@Aedius @benjamineskola language consists of two parts, the form and the sign

the form is the "tangible" part of the language, e.g. this text, or whatever soundwave physics bullshit is happening when we talk

the sign is the meaning, what you might visualize in your head when you read the word "cat"

LLMs only have access to form, so when the meaning of text is important (read: always), LLMs are not very useful

to this, promptfondlers always reply "but today is the worst it's ever gonna be"

[prietschka@mastodon.social]

@benjamineskola The problem with Obasanjo is he's utterly unprincipled and just chasing engagement/self-aggrandizement. His purpose for being in social spaces like Masto/Bluesky/X is to stroke his ego, so everything he does is just an act of public masturbation.

He's interested in self-aggrandizement and self-promotion, nothing more.

Which is why I use the descriptor "piece of shit" with regard to him.

[mushroom_man@infosec.exchange]

@junkman I see your car analogy and I raise you a slavery analogy: that, too, had “proved some degree of usefulness” for “some people very good at wielding it as a tool”.

And I bet you’d rather not know how it worked (works) if you were the one finding it handy for the benefits it provided you. Saying you don’t partake while loudly proclaiming its usefulness is not fooling anyone.

[beatpoet13@mastodon.social]

@benjamineskola
perhaps renaming them little lying malware might help ...

[benjamineskola@hachyderm.io]

@Beatpoet13 in all seriousness I don’t like the terminology of ‘lying’ here either. It implies intent.

It’s not a lie for the same reason that it’s not a hallucination; there’s no difference from the LLM’s perspective. It’s not capable of evaluating the truth-value of its output, much less intentionally producing untrue (or true) statements. It’s mere probability.

Responsible usage of these tools would involve mechanisms to increase the probability of the desired output, but pretending it’s capable of evaluating that itself will not help at all.

[linkplay@biplus.social]

@nelson @benjamineskola @solonovamax
yeah, i think my take from about a year ago still mostly holds up https://biplus.social/@linkplay/114828181247605258

[complexmath@hachyderm.io]

@nelson @solonovamax @benjamineskola For better and worse, ML is an optimization algorithm designed to provide statistically close-to-ideal responses (with some jitter to break out of bad loops) to arbitrary input based on training (historic data). It's fantastic for, say, industrial control systems that want to keep a chemical reaction under control, but the nature of the math is that you can train it on any sequence of values, and this includes words. The problem is that language has contextual meaning, and the human brain is very much built to see patterns and meaning in things, even when they aren't there. Like how we see faces in clouds, for example. This technology is the faces in clouds engine.

[montgomerygator@fouroclockfarms.club]

@benjamineskola It never stopped being this, just a version of this that has reduced errors. It's a corrective algorithm being fed noise and direction to correct towards. It has no sense of self, reality, or anything like that. Just an overgrown version of your noise canceling headphones algorithm, where the outside noise is it's starting point and your music is the prompt it tried to acheve.

[benjamineskola@hachyderm.io]

@MontgomeryGator I don’t think I said otherwise.

[complexmath@hachyderm.io]

@nelson @solonovamax @benjamineskola If you're at all interested in some of the historic discourse regarding this sort of technology, google John Searle's Chinese room argument.

[cxj@phpc.social]

@benjamineskola Thank you for putting it so clearly.

[montgomerygator@fouroclockfarms.club]

@benjamineskola Oh, I wasn't arguing with you. I was reinforcing your point with an engineering perspective. Literally why GenAI can never have hallucinations taken out, since its all just a controlled hallucination from the start.

[benjamineskola@hachyderm.io]

@MontgomeryGator ah, sorry, I didn’t realise that ‘this’ referred to the image and interpreted it as a disagreement with something I was saying.

No, you’re right, and that’s the problem with terminology like ‘hallucination’ or ‘lying’: the implication that there’s any distinction between the types of output it produces other than how much the user subjectively values them.

[sherapantsuit@mastodon.social]

@benjamineskola @Beatpoet13 it can be helpful to replace an llm with "repeatedly pressing the suggested word on your phone keyboard."

If it spits out "I am a funny hamster", you wouldn't say it lied.

Humans are just not conditioned --- not wired, frankly --- to engage with machine generated, syntactically valid text. We suck at it. The ELIZA Effect wins every time.

[benjamineskola@hachyderm.io]

@SheRaPantsuit @Beatpoet13 Yeah, there’s probably something to be said about UI affordances or something like that, where the chat interface guides people into assuming intentionality where there is none, and where some other presentation might be more objectively received.

[transbian_arsonists@catwithaclari.net]

@benjamineskola@hachyderm.io well yeah if they knew how it worked they wouldnt advocate for it

- posted by Seraphine
Headmate Hopper

[solonovamax@tech.lgbt]

@nelson @benjamineskola agents (the general word for entities performing actions to achieve their goal, not talking about necessarily "AI agents", this word even applies to people, and even something like a thermostat that controls temperature) that wish to achieve their goals should be able to accurately model the real world
their ability to model the real world is directly correlated with their ability to achieve their goals. so, an agent which can accurately model the real world is able to achieve its goal much more easily that one that cannot accurately model the real world

and, people generally call an accurate model of the real world "truth"

hypothetically, the transformer architecture should be able to scale to human-level intelligence as it is turing-complete.
so, how it was trained doesn't necessarily matter, it's just that it is not capable of modeling the real world, so it cannot evaluate the truthiness of a statement