LLM advocates still don’t seem to be able to comprehend that ordering the machine not to ‘make stuff up’ doesn’t help.
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@junkman sorry, did I seem like I was interested in yet another defence of LLMs?
@benjamineskola nah, man. You do you, proceed with the dunking.
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@solonovamax @benjamineskola i feel like it's more that it just wasn't built to give out answers, it was trained not to answer truthfully and "understand" but to just come up with something that sounds kind of convincing
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@benjamineskola reminds me of meeting with the business side of my job and the marketing people keep thinking if they word the requirements juuuuust right suddenly I'll be able to do the impossible.
LLM are a Skinner Box.
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That's funny when you explain to people how it really works, if they are not LLM advocates, they see exactly why it can't work.
It's literally created with to make stuff up.
@Aedius yes, like... if you accept that this is just how they work, you might be able to use them productively for the limited tasks they're capable of doing at. But refusing to understand the way they work and then yelling at them about it is just embarrassing.
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@solonovamax @benjamineskola i feel like it's more that it just wasn't built to give out answers, it was trained not to answer truthfully and "understand" but to just come up with something that sounds kind of convincing
@nelson @solonovamax no, it's not capable of understanding. it's not a thing that this sort of technology could do.
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@nelson @solonovamax no, it's not capable of understanding. it's not a thing that this sort of technology could do.
@benjamineskola @solonovamax yeah it's just good at knowing what the next word is, so it can string something mathematically coherent
kind of like how "ai art" tends to be extremely generic looking because it quite literally aims to pick the most average in its dataset for a specific prompt
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@benjamineskola I don't partake on the LLM stuff but they've already proved some degree of usefulness.
I don't think people in general would trust them with sensitive (health, well being) stuff but from what I hear, some people are very good at wielding it as a tool.
I don't know how my car works, I'd be a terrible mechanic and racer. Still, it's very handy tool for me to move around.
@junkman like in all seriousness it's fine to have some degree of missing knowledge about how your car works, but if you believe that it's capable of avoiding collisions by itself and your method of reducing collisions is just to ask it to try harder, you'd be a danger to yourself and others.
I'm not asking people to have deep knowledge of the mathematics behind LLMs, but I do expect people who are actively advocating their adoption not to make up outright fantasies about how they work.
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@solonovamax @benjamineskola Exactly — IT DOESN’T THINK. It’s not a mind, but just a huge statistical matrix.
(And in top of that, don’t folks like this feel ashamed that their job has devolved to pleading with a mindless idiot genie, rather than writing deterministic code?)
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LLM advocates still don’t seem to be able to comprehend that ordering the machine not to ‘make stuff up’ doesn’t help. It doesn’t know when it’s making stuff up, and it couldn’t change that even if you told it to. (In fact it’s always just making stuff up, and is only ever true by chance.)
Part of why I’m so negative about them is that their advocates simply do not understand how they work and do not seem to want to.
@benjamineskola
It's all halucinations, there's just a magical line where we don't mind the output on the one side and we do on the other. There is literally no distinction between the two -
@solonovamax @benjamineskola Exactly — IT DOESN’T THINK. It’s not a mind, but just a huge statistical matrix.
(And in top of that, don’t folks like this feel ashamed that their job has devolved to pleading with a mindless idiot genie, rather than writing deterministic code?)
@michaelgemar @solonovamax Yes precisely. An argument that a huge statistical matrix is useful for certain tasks is valid.
(I disagree. It seems bad at all the tasks people want to use it for, as well as wasteful and soul-destroying. But it’s at least valid.)
But pretending it’s doing something that it isn’t undermines any possibility of actual usefulness.
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@benjamineskola
It's all halucinations, there's just a magical line where we don't mind the output on the one side and we do on the other. There is literally no distinction between the two@bloognoo yes, that’s exactly my point.
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LLM advocates still don’t seem to be able to comprehend that ordering the machine not to ‘make stuff up’ doesn’t help. It doesn’t know when it’s making stuff up, and it couldn’t change that even if you told it to. (In fact it’s always just making stuff up, and is only ever true by chance.)
Part of why I’m so negative about them is that their advocates simply do not understand how they work and do not seem to want to.
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.
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@solonovamax @benjamineskola Exactly — IT DOESN’T THINK. It’s not a mind, but just a huge statistical matrix.
(And in top of that, don’t folks like this feel ashamed that their job has devolved to pleading with a mindless idiot genie, rather than writing deterministic code?)
@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
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@michaelgemar @solonovamax Yes precisely. An argument that a huge statistical matrix is useful for certain tasks is valid.
(I disagree. It seems bad at all the tasks people want to use it for, as well as wasteful and soul-destroying. But it’s at least valid.)
But pretending it’s doing something that it isn’t undermines any possibility of actual usefulness.
@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.
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That's funny when you explain to people how it really works, if they are not LLM advocates, they see exactly why it can't work.
It's literally created with to make stuff up.
@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"
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@prietschka I do recall that a few weeks back he was complaining that LLM advocates get made to feel unwelcome on the fediverse. (OK? I don’t care. It’s nobody’s job to make people feel good about their bad opinions.)
And then just a couple of days ago he was posting something critical, and like … yes this is what we’ve been saying all along.
@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.
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@benjamineskola I don't partake on the LLM stuff but they've already proved some degree of usefulness.
I don't think people in general would trust them with sensitive (health, well being) stuff but from what I hear, some people are very good at wielding it as a tool.
I don't know how my car works, I'd be a terrible mechanic and racer. Still, it's very handy tool for me to move around.
@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.
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LLM advocates still don’t seem to be able to comprehend that ordering the machine not to ‘make stuff up’ doesn’t help. It doesn’t know when it’s making stuff up, and it couldn’t change that even if you told it to. (In fact it’s always just making stuff up, and is only ever true by chance.)
Part of why I’m so negative about them is that their advocates simply do not understand how they work and do not seem to want to.
@benjamineskola
perhaps renaming them little lying malware might help ... -
@benjamineskola
perhaps renaming them little lying malware might help ...@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.
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@benjamineskola @solonovamax yeah it's just good at knowing what the next word is, so it can string something mathematically coherent
kind of like how "ai art" tends to be extremely generic looking because it quite literally aims to pick the most average in its dataset for a specific prompt
@nelson @benjamineskola @solonovamax
yeah, i think my take from about a year ago still mostly holds up https://biplus.social/@linkplay/114828181247605258
