4 ms·

I think LLMs are absolutely fantastic tools. But I think we keep getting stuck on calling them AI. LLMs are not sentient. We can make great strides if we treat

I think LLMs are absolutely fantastic tools. But I think we keep getting stuck on calling them AI. LLMs are not sentient. We can make great strides if we treat them as the next generation of helpers for all intellectual and creative arts.

MengerSponge 1y ago
OpenAI (and its peer companies) have deliberately muddied the waters of that language. AI is a marketing term that lets them use disparate systems' success to inflate confidence in their promised utility.
- ripped_britches 1y ago
  Nope they started an AI company and then started messing around with robotics and then landing on LLMs as a runway.
  - coldtea 1y ago
    None of the above refutes or even addresses the parent's point.
- lucumo 1y ago
  Meh. People have been calling much dumber algorithms "AI" for decades. You guys are just pedants.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    By the way, don’t call it “AI.” That catchall phrase, which used to cover everything from expert systems and neural networks to robotics and vision systems, is now passe in some circles. The preferred terms now are “knowledge-based systems” and “intelligent systems”, claimed Computerworld magazine in 1991. https://archive.org/details/computerworld2530unse/page/59/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/computerworld2530unse/page/59/mo...
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
      - card_zero 1y ago
        Uh-huh. If you call it artificial intelligence people quibble, as they should.
        ACCount37 1y ago
        I disagree entirely. I think that this "quibble" is just cope. People don't want machines to infringe on their precious "intelligence". So for any notable AI advance, they rush to come up with a reason why it's "not ackhtually intelligent". Even if those machines obviously do the kind of tasks that were entirely exclusive to humans just a few years ago. Or were in the realm of "machines would never be able to do this" a few years ago.
        card_zero 1y ago
        I for one am a counter-example. I'd be delighted by the discovery of actual artificial intelligence, which is obviously possible in principle.
        ACCount37 1y ago
        And what would that "actual artificial intelligence" be, pray tell me? What is this magical, impossible-to-capture thing that disqualifies LLMs?
        card_zero 1y ago
        Well, fuck knows. However, that doesn't automatically make this a "no true Scotsman" argument. Sometimes we just don't know an answer. Here's a question for you, actually: what's the criterion for being non-intelligent?
  - coldtea 1y ago
    And that was fine, since the algorithms being much dumber then, never made laymen think "this is intelligent in a human-like way". Plus few cared for AI or AI products per se for the most part. Now that AI is a household term, and that has human-like output and discussion capabilities, and used by laymen for anything, from diet advice to psychotherapy, the connotation is more damaging since people understand LLMs being AI as having human agency and understanding of the world.
ViscountPenguin 1y ago
I really don't get this argument. I see it all the time, but the term AI has been used for over half a century for algorithms far less sophisticated than modern LLMs. I don't think erasing history, and saying that nothing Peter Norvig worked on was "AI" makes any sense at all.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  LLMs were the first introduction to AI for a lot of people. And AI effect is as strong as it ever was. So now, there's a lot of "not ackhtually intelligent" going around!
- dybber 1y ago
  The issue is that what is considered AI in the general population is a floating definition, with only the newest advances being called AI in media etc. Is internet search AI? Is route planning? Technology as a term has the same problem, “technology companies” are developing the newest digital technologies. A spoon or a pencil is also technology according to definition, but a pencil making company is not considered a technology company. There is some quote by Alan Kay about this, but can’t find it now. I try to avoid both terms as they change meaning depending on the receiver.
- AngryData 1y ago
  I, and im willing to bet many other people, also had an issue with previous things being called AI too. Just none of it became a prevalent enough topic for many people to hear complaints about its usage because the people who were actually talking about algorithms and AI already knew the limitations of what they were talking about, unless it was marketing materials but most people ignore marketing material claims because they are almost always complete bullshit.
- coldtea 1y ago
  >I really don't get this argument. I see it all the time, but the term AI has been used for over half a century for algorithms far less sophisticated than modern LLMs. And it was fine there, because nobody, not even a layman, would mixup those with regular human intelligence (or AGI). And laymen didn't care about those AI products or algorithms except as novelties, specicialized tools (like chess engines), or objects of ridicule (like the Clippy). So we might be using AI as a term, but it was either as a techical term in the field, or as a vague term the average layman didn't care about much, and whose fruits would never conflate with general intelligence. But now people attribute intelligence of the human kind to LLMs all the time, and not just laymen either. That's the issue the parent wants to point.
goku12 1y ago
Intelligence doesn't imply sentience, does it? Is there an issue in calling a non-sentient system intelligent?
- dcanelhas 1y ago
  It depends on how intelligence is defined. In the traditional AI sense it is usually "doing things that, when done by people, would be thought of as requiring intelligence". So you get things like planning, forecasting, interpreting texts falling into "AI" even though you might be using a combinatorial solver for one, curve fitting for the other and training a language model for the third. People say that this muddies the definition of AI, but it doesn't really need to be the case. Sentience as in having some form of self-awareness, identity, personal goals, rankings of future outcomes and current states, a sense that things have "meaning" isn't part of the definition. Some argue that this lack of experience about what something feels like (I think this might be termed "qualia" but I'm not sure) is why artificial intelligence shouldn't be considered intelligence at all.
- hliyan 1y ago
  Shifting goalposts of AI aside, intelligence as a general faculty does not require sentience, consciousness, awareness, qualia, valence or any of the things traditionally associated with a high level of biological intelligence. But what it does require: the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input. An LLM does only this. Where as a human-like intelligence has some form on internal randomness, plus an internal world model against which such randomized output could get validated.
  - barnacs 1y ago
    > the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input. Isn't that what mathematical extrapolation or statistical inference does? To me, that's not even close to intelligence.
    - coldtea 1y ago
tim333 1y ago
Using normal usage, LLMs are one type of AI (computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence) and no AI produced so far seems sentient (ability to experience feelings and sensations). Definitions from the Wikipedia articles.

MengerSponge 1y ago

OpenAI (and its peer companies) have deliberately muddied the waters of that language. AI is a marketing term that lets them use disparate systems' success to inflate confidence in their promised utility.

ripped_britches 1y ago
Nope they started an AI company and then started messing around with robotics and then landing on LLMs as a runway.
- coldtea 1y ago
  None of the above refutes or even addresses the parent's point.
lucumo 1y ago
Meh. People have been calling much dumber algorithms "AI" for decades. You guys are just pedants.
- card_zero 1y ago
  By the way, don’t call it “AI.” That catchall phrase, which used to cover everything from expert systems and neural networks to robotics and vision systems, is now passe in some circles. The preferred terms now are “knowledge-based systems” and “intelligent systems”, claimed Computerworld magazine in 1991. https://archive.org/details/computerworld2530unse/page/59/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/computerworld2530unse/page/59/mo...
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
    - card_zero 1y ago
      Uh-huh. If you call it artificial intelligence people quibble, as they should.
      - ACCount37 1y ago
        I disagree entirely. I think that this "quibble" is just cope. People don't want machines to infringe on their precious "intelligence". So for any notable AI advance, they rush to come up with a reason why it's "not ackhtually intelligent". Even if those machines obviously do the kind of tasks that were entirely exclusive to humans just a few years ago. Or were in the realm of "machines would never be able to do this" a few years ago.
        card_zero 1y ago
        I for one am a counter-example. I'd be delighted by the discovery of actual artificial intelligence, which is obviously possible in principle.
        ACCount37 1y ago
        And what would that "actual artificial intelligence" be, pray tell me? What is this magical, impossible-to-capture thing that disqualifies LLMs?
        card_zero 1y ago
        Well, fuck knows. However, that doesn't automatically make this a "no true Scotsman" argument. Sometimes we just don't know an answer. Here's a question for you, actually: what's the criterion for being non-intelligent?
- coldtea 1y ago
  And that was fine, since the algorithms being much dumber then, never made laymen think "this is intelligent in a human-like way". Plus few cared for AI or AI products per se for the most part. Now that AI is a household term, and that has human-like output and discussion capabilities, and used by laymen for anything, from diet advice to psychotherapy, the connotation is more damaging since people understand LLMs being AI as having human agency and understanding of the world.

ViscountPenguin 1y ago

I really don't get this argument. I see it all the time, but the term AI has been used for over half a century for algorithms far less sophisticated than modern LLMs. I don't think erasing history, and saying that nothing Peter Norvig worked on was "AI" makes any sense at all.

ACCount37 1y ago
LLMs were the first introduction to AI for a lot of people. And AI effect is as strong as it ever was. So now, there's a lot of "not ackhtually intelligent" going around!
dybber 1y ago
The issue is that what is considered AI in the general population is a floating definition, with only the newest advances being called AI in media etc. Is internet search AI? Is route planning? Technology as a term has the same problem, “technology companies” are developing the newest digital technologies. A spoon or a pencil is also technology according to definition, but a pencil making company is not considered a technology company. There is some quote by Alan Kay about this, but can’t find it now. I try to avoid both terms as they change meaning depending on the receiver.
AngryData 1y ago
I, and im willing to bet many other people, also had an issue with previous things being called AI too. Just none of it became a prevalent enough topic for many people to hear complaints about its usage because the people who were actually talking about algorithms and AI already knew the limitations of what they were talking about, unless it was marketing materials but most people ignore marketing material claims because they are almost always complete bullshit.
coldtea 1y ago
>I really don't get this argument. I see it all the time, but the term AI has been used for over half a century for algorithms far less sophisticated than modern LLMs. And it was fine there, because nobody, not even a layman, would mixup those with regular human intelligence (or AGI). And laymen didn't care about those AI products or algorithms except as novelties, specicialized tools (like chess engines), or objects of ridicule (like the Clippy). So we might be using AI as a term, but it was either as a techical term in the field, or as a vague term the average layman didn't care about much, and whose fruits would never conflate with general intelligence. But now people attribute intelligence of the human kind to LLMs all the time, and not just laymen either. That's the issue the parent wants to point.

goku12 1y ago

Intelligence doesn't imply sentience, does it? Is there an issue in calling a non-sentient system intelligent?

dcanelhas 1y ago
It depends on how intelligence is defined. In the traditional AI sense it is usually "doing things that, when done by people, would be thought of as requiring intelligence". So you get things like planning, forecasting, interpreting texts falling into "AI" even though you might be using a combinatorial solver for one, curve fitting for the other and training a language model for the third. People say that this muddies the definition of AI, but it doesn't really need to be the case. Sentience as in having some form of self-awareness, identity, personal goals, rankings of future outcomes and current states, a sense that things have "meaning" isn't part of the definition. Some argue that this lack of experience about what something feels like (I think this might be termed "qualia" but I'm not sure) is why artificial intelligence shouldn't be considered intelligence at all.
hliyan 1y ago
Shifting goalposts of AI aside, intelligence as a general faculty does not require sentience, consciousness, awareness, qualia, valence or any of the things traditionally associated with a high level of biological intelligence. But what it does require: the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input. An LLM does only this. Where as a human-like intelligence has some form on internal randomness, plus an internal world model against which such randomized output could get validated.
- barnacs 1y ago
  > the ability to produce useful output beyond the sum total of past experience and present (sensory) input. Isn't that what mathematical extrapolation or statistical inference does? To me, that's not even close to intelligence.
  - coldtea 1y ago

tim333 1y ago

Using normal usage, LLMs are one type of AI (computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence) and no AI produced so far seems sentient (ability to experience feelings and sensations). Definitions from the Wikipedia articles.