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Wrong. Too many people do anthropomorphize LLMs. And few people actually understand how LLMs work, or how to detect errors and hallucinations. Calling LLM autoc

Wrong. Too many people do anthropomorphize LLMs. And few people actually understand how LLMs work, or how to detect errors and hallucinations. Calling LLM autocomplete "AI" deliberately conflates the tech with sci-fi tropes that many people already confuse with reality. Numerous examples, from ELIZA to Watson, internet-based scams and frauds, full self-driving, to all of crypto demonstrate human credulity and gullibility, magnified if people think they will either profit or lose financially. The technology behind LLMs probably does have some interesting and valuable applications. But look at the hype and follow the money with a skeptical eye. If so-called AI does or will soon deliver real benefits then why all of the hype around it? Show, don't tell, and especially don't tell stories based on possible future advances or breakthroughs. Future editions of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds will have long chapters about crypto and AI. If you think most people understand the tech and its limitations and don't act according to gullibility, ignorance, and greed that book should disabuse you.

deltaninenine 3y ago
[flagged]
- happysadpanda2 3y ago
  While I believe much of what you argue is correct, I do unfortunately also believe that ultimately you are incorrect: For the non-techy part of the population, and certainly eve a percentage of the techy part of the population, there will be those who don't have an hour out of their daily lives to play around and discover the limits of chatgpt etc. Worse still, an even larger portion of that crowd, even if they have an hour to spare, just... won't. Playing around with an LLM just isn't something most people would find entertaining or enlightening enough to do out of their own volition. What I find more likely to happen, is that the members of above crowd will instead slowly, over time, get the occasional dose of exposure of an interaction with an LLM, and as long as the response yielded isn't batshit crazy, these people will likely develop a growing sense of confidence in these LLMs. At that point, it will likely be very difficult proving to them that the LLMs are far from perfect.
  - deltaninenine 3y ago
    That's just your opinion. I say we need to prove this out. If a significant portion of the tech and non techy population anthropomorphized LLMs to the point where they don't understand that LLMs hallucinate then surely some of those people exist on HN. If one of you readers is one such person who honestly has no idea what it means for chatGPT to "hallucinate" then let us know (and be honest, please don't troll). My bet is no one will respond with affirmation because the amount of people who don't get it is miniscule.
    - gregjor 3y ago
      You're arguing that something observed so often and consistently that it has had a name for decades -- the ELIZA Effect [1] -- doesn't actually happen often enough to care about. I have referred to ChatGPT hallucinations with multiple friends and family, some in tech and some not (like my parents and my kids), and with one exception none of them knew what I was talking about. Like most people they think computers can't make mistakes, so it follows logically (for them) that an (apparently) intelligent machine can't make mistakes, i.e. hallucinate. I have a couple of my own ChatGPT transcripts that include hallucinations and when I show those to people they say that I deliberately misled the AI, because how could it make a mistake? In my own experience, which includes people who work in the software field and people who don't, including a couple of friends who work with neural networks and LLMs, almost no one understands how LLMs work, or what limitations they might have, or what "hallucinate" means in the context of ChatGPT. Almost everyone I know is much more likely to believe AIs have already or will soon put them out of a job and start turning us into slaves or launching nuclear strikes, because that's the nonsense they get fed my the media. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
      - deltaninenine 3y ago
        >doesn't actually happen often enough to care about. That's my entire point. It doesn't happen often enough to care about. Sounds like you have some anecdotal experience of it happening to your entire family and a lot of your friends. I experience the opposite. It has happened to exactly none of my friends and family. We do live in contradictory universes where you experience one thing and I experience another thing. Given the contradiction let's refer to the shared experience: nobody on this entire HN thread has experienced the Eliza effect. The shared experience proves my pov. >Almost everyone I know is much more likely to believe AIs have already or will soon put them out of a job This first part of your sentence has a higher likelihood of being true. The reason is because there are instances of it are already happening. It's limited given the limitations of LLMs but we are at a point where if the hallucinations are fixed then it can very much replace many jobs. Nuclear strikes and slavery is a bit far fetched.
- gregjor 3y ago
  > If you think you're superior because you're in software or IT or you've done ML in different contexts? I'm here to tell you, that unless you're not a layman and actually build LLMs, you're not because all your info is from the same place as all the other people outside of tech. You don't need expertise building LLMs to interpret the hype and see who has financial interests in promoting non-existent technology, calling it AI and allowing people to get excited and/or scared because the same terminology gets used in 2001 and Terminator. How LLMs actually work has very little to do with how people perceive them, or how they might affect daily life, to say nothing of how they might affect share prices. > it's the actually the experts who started the extinction AI petition Some experts, and lots of people who have not themselves built LLMs, such as Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak. Look at the foundation behind the letter and show me all the AI experts who know how to build LLMs [1]. Alan Alda? Morgan Freeman? Sure, some people with respected names in the field did sign, as did some VCs and executives most likely trying to buy time for their own products. Some experts who didn't sign the letter: Stephen Wolfram [2], Juergen "father of AI" Schmidhuber [3], Rodney Brooks [4], Donald Knuth [5]. I think I can safely state that no consensus exists among the "experts" who do know how LLMs work, and how other things that got called "AI" in the past work. You can find just as much skepticism as FUD. Rather conveniently the AI hype-train makes forgetting about Web3, the metaverse, and crypto easier, even if you see the same names come up. > Anyway an hour with chatGPT and reading some articles on LLMs is enough for anyone to know the boundaries of LLMs. No, that isn't enough time, not even for someone who knows a little about what they're looking at. You seem to make two inconsistent rebuttals: Most people can quickly figure out the limitations of LLMs like ChatGPT, and critics who haven't made LLMs don't know what they're talking about and should shut up. As for the first claim, I'll point out that people have used microwave ovens for five decades and way too many everyday users associate microwave ovens with radioactivity. People drive cars every day and can't explain the first thing about the technology. I think you grossly overestimate how deeply people understand technology they use every day. Just ask a cell phone user how cellular communications works. Dr. Johnson punctured the second argument a long time ago: "You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables." > Mind you, there will be stories of people that are fooled but those people are obviously a huge minority of chatGPT users. ChatGPT is already plugged into the Bing search engine, and into Windows, MS Office, and other products. New integrations and plugins get announced every day. The technology is rolling out behind other products and applications, and very soon (if not already) regular users will interact with ChatGPT or something like it without knowing that. They may spend hours with a chatbot and not interpret bad information as a hallucination or error. As so many experts have already talked about, the danger from what we're calling AI this decade isn't SkyNet or getting turned into paperclips, but people fooling themselves, or getting deliberately tricked and scammed, by a technology that they don't understand and have attached sci-fi capabilities to. People with financial interests like Sam Altman out there promoting fantasies of AI threatening humanity perpetuate the ignorance by pretending we're on the edge of the sci-fi dystopia, when actually LLMs are nowhere near AGI, and Altman knows that. "Look over there, watch out for the killer robots while I pick your pocket." Ker-ching. [1] https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime... [2] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-... [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hessiejones/2023/05/23/juergen-schmidhuber-renowned-father-of-modern-ai-says-his-lifes-work-wont-lead-to-dystopia/?sh=69b983da51ab https://www.forbes.com/sites/hessiejones/2023/05/23/juergen-... [4] https://spectrum.ieee.org/gpt-4-calm-down https://spectrum.ieee.org/gpt-4-calm-down [5] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt
storkhm 3y ago
I would say the most interesting thoughts I have read on this are from Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Google last summer. He believes we basically anthropomorphize each other. He made a great point how every child basically anthropomorphizes a doll. Anthropomorphizing is just second nature to us. I would highly recommend reading his two longish medium essays on the subject. The part about AI and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is just utter bullshit. Come on. I am sure you don't really believe that.

deltaninenine 3y ago

[flagged]

happysadpanda2 3y ago
While I believe much of what you argue is correct, I do unfortunately also believe that ultimately you are incorrect: For the non-techy part of the population, and certainly eve a percentage of the techy part of the population, there will be those who don't have an hour out of their daily lives to play around and discover the limits of chatgpt etc. Worse still, an even larger portion of that crowd, even if they have an hour to spare, just... won't. Playing around with an LLM just isn't something most people would find entertaining or enlightening enough to do out of their own volition. What I find more likely to happen, is that the members of above crowd will instead slowly, over time, get the occasional dose of exposure of an interaction with an LLM, and as long as the response yielded isn't batshit crazy, these people will likely develop a growing sense of confidence in these LLMs. At that point, it will likely be very difficult proving to them that the LLMs are far from perfect.
- deltaninenine 3y ago
  That's just your opinion. I say we need to prove this out. If a significant portion of the tech and non techy population anthropomorphized LLMs to the point where they don't understand that LLMs hallucinate then surely some of those people exist on HN. If one of you readers is one such person who honestly has no idea what it means for chatGPT to "hallucinate" then let us know (and be honest, please don't troll). My bet is no one will respond with affirmation because the amount of people who don't get it is miniscule.
  - gregjor 3y ago
    You're arguing that something observed so often and consistently that it has had a name for decades -- the ELIZA Effect [1] -- doesn't actually happen often enough to care about. I have referred to ChatGPT hallucinations with multiple friends and family, some in tech and some not (like my parents and my kids), and with one exception none of them knew what I was talking about. Like most people they think computers can't make mistakes, so it follows logically (for them) that an (apparently) intelligent machine can't make mistakes, i.e. hallucinate. I have a couple of my own ChatGPT transcripts that include hallucinations and when I show those to people they say that I deliberately misled the AI, because how could it make a mistake? In my own experience, which includes people who work in the software field and people who don't, including a couple of friends who work with neural networks and LLMs, almost no one understands how LLMs work, or what limitations they might have, or what "hallucinate" means in the context of ChatGPT. Almost everyone I know is much more likely to believe AIs have already or will soon put them out of a job and start turning us into slaves or launching nuclear strikes, because that's the nonsense they get fed my the media. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
    - deltaninenine 3y ago
      >doesn't actually happen often enough to care about. That's my entire point. It doesn't happen often enough to care about. Sounds like you have some anecdotal experience of it happening to your entire family and a lot of your friends. I experience the opposite. It has happened to exactly none of my friends and family. We do live in contradictory universes where you experience one thing and I experience another thing. Given the contradiction let's refer to the shared experience: nobody on this entire HN thread has experienced the Eliza effect. The shared experience proves my pov. >Almost everyone I know is much more likely to believe AIs have already or will soon put them out of a job This first part of your sentence has a higher likelihood of being true. The reason is because there are instances of it are already happening. It's limited given the limitations of LLMs but we are at a point where if the hallucinations are fixed then it can very much replace many jobs. Nuclear strikes and slavery is a bit far fetched.
gregjor 3y ago
> If you think you're superior because you're in software or IT or you've done ML in different contexts? I'm here to tell you, that unless you're not a layman and actually build LLMs, you're not because all your info is from the same place as all the other people outside of tech. You don't need expertise building LLMs to interpret the hype and see who has financial interests in promoting non-existent technology, calling it AI and allowing people to get excited and/or scared because the same terminology gets used in 2001 and Terminator. How LLMs actually work has very little to do with how people perceive them, or how they might affect daily life, to say nothing of how they might affect share prices. > it's the actually the experts who started the extinction AI petition Some experts, and lots of people who have not themselves built LLMs, such as Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak. Look at the foundation behind the letter and show me all the AI experts who know how to build LLMs [1]. Alan Alda? Morgan Freeman? Sure, some people with respected names in the field did sign, as did some VCs and executives most likely trying to buy time for their own products. Some experts who didn't sign the letter: Stephen Wolfram [2], Juergen "father of AI" Schmidhuber [3], Rodney Brooks [4], Donald Knuth [5]. I think I can safely state that no consensus exists among the "experts" who do know how LLMs work, and how other things that got called "AI" in the past work. You can find just as much skepticism as FUD. Rather conveniently the AI hype-train makes forgetting about Web3, the metaverse, and crypto easier, even if you see the same names come up. > Anyway an hour with chatGPT and reading some articles on LLMs is enough for anyone to know the boundaries of LLMs. No, that isn't enough time, not even for someone who knows a little about what they're looking at. You seem to make two inconsistent rebuttals: Most people can quickly figure out the limitations of LLMs like ChatGPT, and critics who haven't made LLMs don't know what they're talking about and should shut up. As for the first claim, I'll point out that people have used microwave ovens for five decades and way too many everyday users associate microwave ovens with radioactivity. People drive cars every day and can't explain the first thing about the technology. I think you grossly overestimate how deeply people understand technology they use every day. Just ask a cell phone user how cellular communications works. Dr. Johnson punctured the second argument a long time ago: "You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables." > Mind you, there will be stories of people that are fooled but those people are obviously a huge minority of chatGPT users. ChatGPT is already plugged into the Bing search engine, and into Windows, MS Office, and other products. New integrations and plugins get announced every day. The technology is rolling out behind other products and applications, and very soon (if not already) regular users will interact with ChatGPT or something like it without knowing that. They may spend hours with a chatbot and not interpret bad information as a hallucination or error. As so many experts have already talked about, the danger from what we're calling AI this decade isn't SkyNet or getting turned into paperclips, but people fooling themselves, or getting deliberately tricked and scammed, by a technology that they don't understand and have attached sci-fi capabilities to. People with financial interests like Sam Altman out there promoting fantasies of AI threatening humanity perpetuate the ignorance by pretending we're on the edge of the sci-fi dystopia, when actually LLMs are nowhere near AGI, and Altman knows that. "Look over there, watch out for the killer robots while I pick your pocket." Ker-ching. [1] https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime... [2] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-... [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hessiejones/2023/05/23/juergen-schmidhuber-renowned-father-of-modern-ai-says-his-lifes-work-wont-lead-to-dystopia/?sh=69b983da51ab https://www.forbes.com/sites/hessiejones/2023/05/23/juergen-... [4] https://spectrum.ieee.org/gpt-4-calm-down https://spectrum.ieee.org/gpt-4-calm-down [5] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt

storkhm 3y ago

I would say the most interesting thoughts I have read on this are from Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Google last summer. He believes we basically anthropomorphize each other. He made a great point how every child basically anthropomorphizes a doll. Anthropomorphizing is just second nature to us. I would highly recommend reading his two longish medium essays on the subject. The part about AI and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is just utter bullshit. Come on. I am sure you don't really believe that.