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"A lightbulb surrounding some plants" is not English. If a wolf pack is surrounding a camp, we understand what it means. If a wolf is surrounding my camp; does

"A lightbulb surrounding some plants" is not English. If a wolf pack is surrounding a camp, we understand what it means. If a wolf is surrounding my camp; does that mean I'm in his stomach? Absurd. "A lightbulb containing some plants," makes sense, not "surrounding". It's too small to surround anything, which humans (and apparently, current AI) understand. Paradoxically, only primitive language models would actually understand the inverted sentences; proper AIs should, like humans, be confused by them; since zero human talks like that. The only reason the Huggingface people (in their Winoground paper) got 90% of humans "getting the answer right" with these absurd prompts because of humans' ability to guess what is expected of them by an experimenter. Do it in daily life instead of a structured test, and see if these same people get it right. It's exactly as if I gave you the sequence, in an IQ-test context: "1 1 2 3" and asked you to give me the next number. You'd give the Fibonacci sequence, because you know I expect it; no matter that it's a stupid assumption to make because the full sequence might as well be "1 1 2 3 1 1 2 3 1 1 2 3", and you don't have enough information to know the real answer. Do we really want AIs that similarly "guess" an answer they know to be wrong, just because we expect it? Or (in number sequence example) AIs that don't understand basic induction/Goodman's Problem? I'd like to add that the author, who keeps referring to himself as a scientist, is in fact a psychology professor. In his Twitter bio, he states that he wrote one of the "Forbes 7 Must-Read Books in AI", which discredits him as a fraud since Forbes can be paid to publish absolutely whatever you ask them to (it's not disclosed as sponsored content, and they're quite cheap, trust me).

adamsmith143 4y ago
>"A lightbulb containing some plants," makes sense, not "surrounding". It's too small to surround anything, which humans (and apparently, current AI) understand. Paradoxically, only primitive language models would actually understand the inverted sentences; proper AIs should, like humans, be confused by them; since zero human talks like that. Not sure this is credible. Most if not all human adults are capable of understanding what young children just learning to speak mean most of the time, not only people with very low IQs. So why would this be any different? Presumably the smarter the AI the better it can understand poor grammar.
- concinds 4y ago
  You understand poor grammar using context. This isn't poor grammar, this is a syntactically broken sentence, which requires more extrapolation for meaning. The AI hears "a lightbulb surrounding some plants" and understands the poor grammar using the context, i.e. understands that you mean that the plants are surrounding the lightbulb, since the reverse is vashingly unlikely to be what you mean. End result: your AI is actually quite good, but HuggingFace IYIs give it a bad grade. So: you fix the AI. You fix it so that it makes huge assumptions when it sees imperfect grammar. It doesn't necessarily pick what it thinks you actually meant; it picks utterly nonsensical crap (plants inside a lightbulb). That AI will end up severely misinterpreting human instructions, at some point or another. That AI is called HAL-9000. But it passes Huggingface's test!
  - Jordrok 4y ago
    > This isn't poor grammar, this is a syntactically broken sentence Absolute nonsense! Sure, "containing" is more precise in conveying the idea, but "surrounding" still results in a perfectly valid sentence that the average human being can comprehend. Pretending otherwise is just being obtuse.
goatlover 4y ago
There is the story of Jonah inside the whale, and art is a thing. So are metaphors. Maybe some english-speaking community uses "wolf surrounding a camp" to mean a person is in the belly of the beast, whatever the beast may mean. The thing with language is that it's flexible, ever-evolving, and people do come up with new uses all the time. That's why it's a challenge for AI to be considered generally intelligent when it comes to language use. Humans aren't merely consulting a dictionary when they talk. As Wittgenstein argued, meaning is use, and dictionaries are updated to reflect that use. Plants inside a lightbulb could come to symbolize green tech, or whatever. We can make up the meaning as we go along, and if enough people find it useful, it becomes part of the language.
- deleted 4y ago
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hasmanean 4y ago
I wonder how canned these queries are. It’s like back in the 80s if you had asked a computer to “show me some culture” and up popped a painting by Da Vinci, that might have fooled people into believing the computer was cultured or at least would make you cultured. In this case the capabilities of the AI are much more dynamic, and the ability to wrap the plants inside a light bulb is pretty neat, but that is basically a photoshop script. It’s barely intelligence. Most people don’t know what intelligence is. They get easily fooled by demos. The history of religion points to an opposite problem. There a superintelligence (God) who had a galaxy a worth of super intelligent beings (angels) could not convince the humanity he created to establish the proper relationship with him. And what’s worse, people were just as happy believing in fake myths (such as the Egyptian, Aryan or Mesopotamian gods) and truly didn’t care if they were real or not. Humans haven’t changed much. Some people will willingly believe AI is intelligent even if it’s not. Even if it produces nothing but comic book wisdom and fake superheroes, eventually they will believe that world is real too…in the metaversal sense. Humanity’s ability to deceive itself is infinite.

adamsmith143 4y ago

>"A lightbulb containing some plants," makes sense, not "surrounding". It's too small to surround anything, which humans (and apparently, current AI) understand. Paradoxically, only primitive language models would actually understand the inverted sentences; proper AIs should, like humans, be confused by them; since zero human talks like that. Not sure this is credible. Most if not all human adults are capable of understanding what young children just learning to speak mean most of the time, not only people with very low IQs. So why would this be any different? Presumably the smarter the AI the better it can understand poor grammar.

concinds 4y ago
You understand poor grammar using context. This isn't poor grammar, this is a syntactically broken sentence, which requires more extrapolation for meaning. The AI hears "a lightbulb surrounding some plants" and understands the poor grammar using the context, i.e. understands that you mean that the plants are surrounding the lightbulb, since the reverse is vashingly unlikely to be what you mean. End result: your AI is actually quite good, but HuggingFace IYIs give it a bad grade. So: you fix the AI. You fix it so that it makes huge assumptions when it sees imperfect grammar. It doesn't necessarily pick what it thinks you actually meant; it picks utterly nonsensical crap (plants inside a lightbulb). That AI will end up severely misinterpreting human instructions, at some point or another. That AI is called HAL-9000. But it passes Huggingface's test!
- Jordrok 4y ago
  > This isn't poor grammar, this is a syntactically broken sentence Absolute nonsense! Sure, "containing" is more precise in conveying the idea, but "surrounding" still results in a perfectly valid sentence that the average human being can comprehend. Pretending otherwise is just being obtuse.

goatlover 4y ago

There is the story of Jonah inside the whale, and art is a thing. So are metaphors. Maybe some english-speaking community uses "wolf surrounding a camp" to mean a person is in the belly of the beast, whatever the beast may mean. The thing with language is that it's flexible, ever-evolving, and people do come up with new uses all the time. That's why it's a challenge for AI to be considered generally intelligent when it comes to language use. Humans aren't merely consulting a dictionary when they talk. As Wittgenstein argued, meaning is use, and dictionaries are updated to reflect that use. Plants inside a lightbulb could come to symbolize green tech, or whatever. We can make up the meaning as we go along, and if enough people find it useful, it becomes part of the language.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

hasmanean 4y ago

I wonder how canned these queries are. It’s like back in the 80s if you had asked a computer to “show me some culture” and up popped a painting by Da Vinci, that might have fooled people into believing the computer was cultured or at least would make you cultured. In this case the capabilities of the AI are much more dynamic, and the ability to wrap the plants inside a light bulb is pretty neat, but that is basically a photoshop script. It’s barely intelligence. Most people don’t know what intelligence is. They get easily fooled by demos. The history of religion points to an opposite problem. There a superintelligence (God) who had a galaxy a worth of super intelligent beings (angels) could not convince the humanity he created to establish the proper relationship with him. And what’s worse, people were just as happy believing in fake myths (such as the Egyptian, Aryan or Mesopotamian gods) and truly didn’t care if they were real or not. Humans haven’t changed much. Some people will willingly believe AI is intelligent even if it’s not. Even if it produces nothing but comic book wisdom and fake superheroes, eventually they will believe that world is real too…in the metaversal sense. Humanity’s ability to deceive itself is infinite.