"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Seriously the sheer amount of people that equate coherent speech with sentience is mind boggling.
All jokes aside, I have heard some decently educated technical people say “yeah, it’s really creepy that it put a random laugh in what it said” or “it broke the 4th wall when talking”… it’s fucking programmed to do that and you just walked right in to it.
Technical term is the ELIZA effect.
In 1966, Professor Weizenbaum made a chatbot called ELIZA that essentially repeats what you say back in different terms.
He then noticed by accident that people keep convincing themselves it's fucking concious.
"I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."
- Prof. Weizenbaum on ELIZA.
Of course it's creepy. Why wouldn't it be? Someone programmed it to do that, or programmed it in such a way that it weighted those additions. That's weird.
And people are programmed to talk like that too. It's just a matter of scale.
The difference is knowledge. You know what an apple is. A LLM does not. It has training data that has the word apple is associated with the words red, green, pie, and doctor.
The model then uses a random number generator to mix those words up a bit, and see if the result looks a bit like the training data, and if it does, the model spits out a sequence of words that may or may not be a sentence, depending on the size and quality of the training data.
At no point is any actual meaning associated with any of the words. The model is just trying to fit different shaped blocks through different shaped holes, and sometimes everything goes through the square hole, and you get hallucinations.
Our brains just get signals coming in from our nerves that we learn to associate with a concept of the apple. We have years of such training data, and we use more than words to tokenize thoughts, and we have much more sophisticated state / memory; but it's essentially the same thing, just much much more complex. Our brains produce output that is consistent with its internal models and constantly use feedback to improve those models.
You think you are saying things which proves you are knowledgeable on this topic, but you are not.
The human brain is not a computer. And any comparisons between the two are wildly simplistic and likely to introduce more error than meaning into the discourse.
but it’s essentially the same thing, just much much more complex
If you say that all your statements and beliefs are a slurry of weighted averages depending on how often you’ve seen something without any thought or analysis involved, I will believe you 🤷♂️
You can tell a person to think about apples, and the person will think about apples.
You can tell an LLM 'think about apples' and the LLM will say 'Okay' but it won't think about apples; it is only saying 'okay' because its training data suggests that is the most common response to someone asking someone else to think about apples. LLMs do not have an internal experience. They are statistical models.
Oh my goddd...
Honestly, I think we need to take all these solipsistic tech-weirdos and trap them in a Starbucks until they can learn how to order a coffee from the counter without hyperventilating.
wut?
Give this guy $100 billion!
I always wanted to teach a robot to say "I think therefore I am".
Ok this is crazy, I just saw this word earlier today in the book I was reading—I know it's primed in my brain now, but really, what are the odds of seeing this again?
And, interestingly, I think the feeling of seeing a new vocab word more often is also apophenia.
Depends, why do you believe you are seeing more often a particular word?
The reason defines whether it is apophenia or not. If you are delusional that it is an alien entity trying to communicate secret information to you in particular, by exposing you to a word more frequently, that's apophenia. If you know it is the frequency illusion and just find it kinda funny how it feels, then it isn't. Anyways, it is more often associated with the perception of patterns of causality in things that are random or banal. I'm of the opinion that this comic in particular is not a good representation of apophenia, other than the fact that the protagonist is certainly disconnected from reality.
I think apophenia describes the feeling of a pattern too, even if you intellectually understand that there isn't a pattern.
It is a clinical term, it doesn't describe a feeling. If you are not disconnected from reality you do not have apophenia. It can be sub clinical or non pathological, but it is not a vague feeling. It is a concrete belief. I'm sorry if I'm harsh with this. I just hate pop appropriation of psychological terms. They always end up distorted into tiktok garbage.
I think it has gained new meaning beyond being a symptom for schizophrenia, such as the tendency for gamblers to believe they're on a lucky streak or other illusions that trick the brain into seeing patterns that aren't there.
Or the wikipedia article is wrong.
Exactly, they do believe it. It's not a vague feeling that is kind of funny but they actually still know logically it isn't true. For the person with apophenia, it is true. The gambler does believe in the pattern of the numbers and their luck is due to come. It is not a vague feeling, it is a belief that has overridden their contact with reality. It can be non pathological or sub clinical, as in, it doesn't affect their day to day life and causes no suffering to themselves or others. But they absolutely believe it and behave accordingly to said belief.
Okay, pareidolia is also a form of apophenia. You can "see" a face in a pile of rocks and be creeped out by it while still understanding that the pile of rocks is not actually a face. Belief doesn't have to override contact with reality, it merely needs to be present.
A gambler feeling lucky might still understand that luck isn't real, but the feeling persists.
Yeah? Well, maybe yours is an illusion, but how to you explain all the dodge rams on the road after I bought mine?
It's a memory optimisation invented by GTA
Love the meme but also hate the drivel that fills the comment sections on these types of things. People immediately start talking past each other. Half state unquantifiable assertions as fact ("...a computer doesn't, like, know what an apple is maaan...") and half pretend that making a sufficiently complex model of the human mind lets them ignore the Hard Problems of Consciousness ("...but, like, what if we just gave it a bigger context window...").
It's actually pretty fun to theorize if you ditch the tribalism. Stuff like the physical constraints of the human brain, what an "artificial mind" could be and what making one could mean practically/philosophically. There's a lot of interesting research and analysis out there and it can help any of us grapple with the human condition.
But alas, we can't have that. An LLM can be a semi-interesting toy to spark a discussion but everyone has some kind of Pavlovian reaction to the topic from the real world shit storm we live in.
(“…a computer doesn’t, like, know what an apple is maaan…”)
I think you're misunderstanding and/or deliberately misrepresenting the point. The point isn't some asinine assertion, it's a very real fundamental problem with using LLMs for any actually useful task.
If you ask a person what an apple is, they think back to their previous experiences. They know what an apple looks like, what it tastes like, what it can be used for, how it feels to hold it. They have a wide variety of experiences that form a complete understanding of what an apple is. If they have never heard of an apple, they'll tell you they've never heard of it.
If you ask an LLM what an apple is, they don't pull from any kind of database of information, they don't pull from experiences, they don't pull from any kind of logic. Rather, they generate an answer that sounds like what a person would say in response to the question, "What is an apple?" They generate this based on nothing more than language itself. To an LLM, the only difference between an apple and a strawberry and a banana and a gibbon is that these things tend to be mentioned in different types of sentences. It is, granted, unlikely to tell you that an apple is a type of ape, but if it did it would say it confidently and with absolutely no doubt in its mind, because it doesn't have a mind and doesn't have doubt and doesn't have an actual way to compare an apple and a gibbon that doesn't involve analyzing the sentences in which the words appear.
The problem is that most of the language-related tasks which would be useful to automate require not just text which sounds grammatically correct but text which makes sense. Text which is written with an understanding of the context and the meanings of the words being used.
An LLM is a very convincing Chinese room. And a Chinese room is not useful.
About the only useful task an LLM could have is generating random NPC dialog for a video game. Even then, it's close to the least efficient way to do it.
As an example of that, try asking a LLM questions about precise details about the lore of a fictional universe you know well, and you know that what you're asking about hasn't ever been detailed.
Not Tolkien because this has been too much discussed on the internet. Pick a universe much more niche.
It will completely invent stuff that kinda makes sense. Because it's predicting the next words that seem likely in the context.
A human would be much less likely to do this because they'd just be able to think and tell you "huh... I don't think the authors ever thought about that".
Is it possible that you try to convince yourself that you are not in any tribe just becouse you picked yours by being contraitan to two tribes that you haslty drew with crude labels?
WE picked our position match our convictions! THEY picked the convictions to match their position. And we know which is which becouse we know which one is ME.
It's interesting but that doesn't mean the online discussions are good, half the time it's some random person's bong hit shit post that you end up reading.
And even tech bros have terrible opinions. See: Peter Thiel.
The tech bros gas AI up for start ups and venture capitalist scams.
Even Dell doesn't believe in AI capabilities as they've noticed consumers are not gravitating to AI features in a saying the quiet part loudly quote (https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/dell-admits-customers-disgusted-pcs-ai)
You cannot get a good honest AI take because propagators simply blindly trust llm output as if it came from God and anti-AI people conveniently ignore useful results like medical screening for cancer (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jan/29/ai-use-in-breast-cancer-screening-cuts-rate-of-later-diagnosis-by-12-study-finds)
Me personally ? I don't want to hear anyone's AI take. I don't use AI but in a future when I would end up using it is when it actually codes properly or does anything I want it to properly. No half assed features.
AI right now for my use cases is completely worthless. Maybe in 50 years that won't be the case but I'm not very hopeful for its progress.
AI being conscious is all gas from tech bros.
I guess "what it means to be conscious" will always be a hot topic, but I'm there with you, it's fun to ponder.
Duude, maybe if we gave it a couple (million) qubits instead? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41416227/
You're committing a different sin, and it's failing to consider that I've already played with these toys 6 years ago and I'm now bored with them.
Also, you're on the fuckAI board, which is a place dedicated to a political position.
Agreed. He's committed the sin of not realizing he's in an echo chamber. How dare he try to have a rational conversation when people like petrol sniff king and I just want to cling to our tribalism! We're right and there's nothing you can to do convince us otherwise.
You are alive.
Just got shown that at a lecture yesterday... Hmm.
Mind blowing 🤯
