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LLMs have already taught us a lot about the culture we live in. Erich Fromm approximately said that the "mental health of a society or individual" is inversely
by nonrandomstring 3y ago
LLMs have already taught us a lot about the culture we live in.
Erich Fromm approximately said that the "mental health of a society or
individual" is inversely proportional to the distance between what it
is and what it thinks it is.
We can measure that distance now. What a society is comprises the
raw training data unceremoniously scooped from the Internet - actually
a statistically decent snapshot of early 21st Century westernism.
What society thinks it is can be understood through the filters,
"guard-rails" and boundaries some want to erect around that raw image.
For the first time we have a numerically solid, if not yet rigorous
tool to describe that space, and what we see is a society deeply
conflicted and uncomfortable with itself.
I think LLMs will revolutionise the social sciences.
- RandomLensman 3y agoNot sure the internet and publicly available data really reflect the "is" properly - I suspect the data to be biased in complex way.
- Kye 3y agoIt's easy to forget most people have no significant online presence, if any, if you spend too much time with very online people.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ithkuil 3y agoThat's true. That said, what can be found online does cover a lot of what offline people do and think and write, since there is a lot of stuff being brought online that wasn't produced online (books, news, ...) Otoh, it's not clear how (or if) LLM training balances the different sources
- mlinhares 3y agoIt’s also important to remember that most of what is online is there to sell ads and does not represent reality in the same quantity. I think people are really trying too hard to find deep meaning everywhere, they might want to read more about social sciences instead.
- bjelkeman-again 3y agoEven someone who has an online presence, I’ll use myself as an example, is so much more than the online presence represents.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nonrandomstring 3y agoAbsolutely. Many sibling comments point out all the ways this is true - that this massive sample (and it is truly big-data) is still a tiny speck of the human condition and spectrum of thought and experience. It raises vital questions about the where the centroid of this cloud of random stuff that people decided to input into the machine really lies? What is not represented in the model? Probably just about everything! Big new questions about objectivity and normalcy occur. Is the average of everybody elses' intelligence actually any use at all to an average individual? Does the average of everybody elses' intelligence have a different kind of use to groups, companies, states, than common utility of synthesising though-like speech?
- solumunus 3y ago> and what we see is a society deeply conflicted and uncomfortable with itself Using an LLM is showing you this? Any examples? On the face of it this sounds ridiculous.
- jayd16 3y agoMaybe I'm misreading it but it sounds like they're just clutching pearls because some people vocally promote censorship.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoYes it does present a censorial opportunity for those so inclined.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoNo the general reaction to LLMs is showing this.
- 48864w6ui 3y agoIf this summary of Fromm were close to true, the Holy Roman Empire would never have been a thing? (Do alien anthropologists write monographs on the incredible capacity of H sapiens to support cognitive dissonance?)
- nonrandomstring 3y agoWe don't experience it as dissonance. That's why he says its insanity, because we should.
- huppeldepup 3y agoWhat society thinks it is can be understood through the filters, "guard-rails" and boundaries some want to erect around that raw image. Never looked at it like that. In the same sense one could look at law and see which ones protect us against ourselves.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoThats a very good connection, thanks.
- bambax 3y agoWe're living yet another revolution against our place in the universe. Copernic showed that it was the earth that revolved around the sun and not the other way around. Darwin showed that humans were just one animal species among many, not very different from others. Since then, we have clung to the idea that we had a special kind of intelligence, unique and possibly supernatural. Yet today, even the smallest LLM running on a smartphone passes the Turing test with flying colors. AI, and AGI that may be around the corner, show that silicon can "think". Many people don't like that idea; I suspect the call for regulations is in part fueled by the ego bruise that AI represents.
- RandomLensman 3y agoLLMs don't pass the Turing so easily (https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.20216 https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.20216).
- CamperBob2 3y agoHot take: they would pass any given variant of the Turing test if you specifically trained them to. The Turing test says more about the human participant than it does about the challenger. Humans, even smart ones, are easy to fool.
- kenjackson 3y agoThis is an interesting study. First It Is fascinating that only 63% thought humans were humans. I think this speaks to the state of AI that this percentage isn’t near 95%. I think this shows that we are astonishingly close to passing the Turing Test, but not there quite yet. But as noted in the paper some of the things that need to change are things like being too good at grammar and punctuation!
- RandomLensman 3y agoIt is also the non-adverserial version of the Turing test, humans might be better in the adversarial one, still. I found the relative high level for ELIZA fascinating, too.