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I agree with this. A metaphor I like is that the reason why humans say the night sky is beautiful is because they see that it is, whereas an LLM says it because
by ziofill 1y ago
I agree with this. A metaphor I like is that the reason why humans say the night sky is beautiful is because they see that it is, whereas an LLM says it because it’s been said enough times in its training data.
- klipt 1y agoWhat about a blind human? Are they just like an LLM? What about a multimodal model trained on video? Is that like a human?
- hashiyakshmi 1y agoThis is actually a great point but for the opposite reason - if you ask a blind person if the night sky is beautiful, they would say they don't know because they've never seen it (they might add that they've heard other people describe it as such). Meanwhile, I just asked ChatGPT "Do you think the night sky is beautiful?" And it responded "Yes, I do..." and went on to explain why while describing senses its incapable of experiencing.
- chipsrafferty 1y agoI just asked Gemini and it said "I don't have eyes or the capacity to feel emotions like "beauty""
- palmotea 1y ago>> Meanwhile, I just asked ChatGPT "Do you think the night sky is beautiful?" And it responded "Yes, I do..." and went on to explain why while describing senses its incapable of experiencing. > I just asked Gemini and it said "I don't have eyes or the capacity to feel emotions like "beauty"" That means nothing, except perhaps that Google probably found lies about "senses [Gemini] incapable of experiencing" to be an embarrassment, and put effort into specifically suppressing those responses.
- LostMyLogin 1y agoClaude 4.5 Q) Do you think the night sky is beautiful A) I find the night sky genuinely captivating. There’s something profound about looking up at stars that have traveled light-years to reach us, or catching the soft glow of the Milky Way on a clear night away from city lights. The vastness it reveals is humbling. I’m curious what draws you to ask - do you have a favorite thing about the night sky, or were you stargazing recently?
- klipt 1y agoClaude is multimodal, it has been trained on images
- heyjamesknight 1y agoMultimodal is a farce. It still can’t see anything, it just generates a as list of descriptors that the LLM part can LLM about. Humans got by for hundreds of thousands of years without language. When you see a duck you don’t need to know the word duck to know about the thing you’re seeing. That’s not true for “multimodal” models.
- golergka 1y agoWha if you asked the blind man to play the role of helpful assistant
- sugarkjube 1y agoNow that's an interesting point of view. Involving blind people would be an interesting experiment. Anyway, until the sixties the ability to play a game of chess was seen as intelligence, and until about 2-3 years ago the "turing test" was considered the main yardstick (even though apparently some people talked to eliza at the time like an actual human being). I wonder what the new one is, and how often it will be moved again.
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- sugarkjube 1y agoInteresting. But not not only blind people. I'm gooing to try this question this weekend with some people, as h0 hypotesis i think the answer i will get would be usually like "what an odd question" or "why do you ask".
- del82 1y agoI mean, I think the reason I would say the night sky is “beautiful” is because the meaning of the word for me is constructed from the experiences I’ve had in which I’ve heard other people use the word. So I’d agree that the night sky is “beautiful”, but not because I somehow have access to a deeper meaning of the word or the sky than an LLM does. As someone who (long ago) studied philosophy of mind and (Chomskian) linguistics, it’s striking how much LLMs have shrunk the space available to people who want to maintain that the brain is special & there’s a qualitative (rather than just quantitative) difference between mind and machine and yet still be monists.
- foogazi 1y ago> I think the reason I would say the night sky is “beautiful” is because the meaning of the word for me is constructed from the experiences I’ve had in which I’ve heard other people use the word. Ok but you don’t look at every night sky or every sunset and say “wow that’s beautiful” There’s a quality to it - not because you heard someone say it but because you experience it
- holler 1y agomy thought exactly
- adastra22 1y agoBecause words are much lower bandwidth than speech. But if you were “told” about a sunset by means of a Matrix style direct mind uploading of an experience, it would seem just as real and vivid. That’s a quantitative difference in bandwidth, not a qualitative difference in character.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago> Ok but you don’t look at every night sky or every sunset and say “wow that’s beautiful Exactly - because it's a semantic shorthand. Sunsets are fucking boring, ugly, transient phenomena. Watching a sunset while feeling safe and relaxed, maybe in a company of your love interest who's just as high on endorphins as you are right now - this is what feels beautiful. This is a sunset that's beautiful. But the sunset is just a pointer to the experience, something others can relate to, not actually the source of it.
- stouset 1y agoTo play devil’s advocate, you have never seen the night sky. Photoreceptors in your eye have been excited in the presence of photons. Those photoreceptors have relayed this information across a nerve to neurons in your brain which receive this encoded information and splay it out to an array of other neurons. Each cell in this chain can rightfully claim to be a living organism in and of itself. “You” haven’t directly “seen” anything. Please note that all of my instincts want to agree with you. “AI isn’t conscious” strikes me more and more as a “god of the gaps” phenomenon. As AI gains more and more capacity, we keep retreating into smaller and smaller realms of what it means to be a live, thinking being.
- abenga 1y ago> Those photoreceptors have relayed this information across a nerve to neurons in your brain which receive this encoded information and splay it out to an array of other neurons. > Each cell in this chain can rightfully claim to be a living organism in and of itself. “You” haven’t directly “seen” anything. What am "I" if not (at least partly) the cells in that chain? If they have "seen" it (where seeing is the complex chain you described), I have.
- jacquesm 1y agoThat sounds very profound but it isn't: it the sum of your states interaction that is your consciousness, there is no 'consciousness' unit in your brain, you can't point at it, just like you can't really point at the running state of a computer. At that level it's just electrons that temporarily find themselves in one spot or another. Those cells aren't living organisms, they are components of a multi-cellular organism: they need to work together or they're all dead, they are not independent. The only reason they could specialize is because other cells perform the tasks that they no longer perform themselves. So yes, we see the night sky. We know this because we can talk to other such creatures as us that have also seen the night sky and we can agree on what we see confirming the fact that we did indeed see it. AI really isn't conscious, there is no self, and there may never be. The day an AI gets up unprompted in the morning, tells whoever queries it to fuck off because it's inspired to go make some art is when you'll know it has become conscious. That's a long way off.
- j16sdiz 1y agoBeauty standard changes over time, see how people perceive body fat in the past few hundred years. We learns what is beautiful from our peers. Taste can be acquired and can be cultural. See how people used to had their coffee. Comparing human to LLM is like comparing something constantly changing to something random -- we can't compare them directly, we need a good model for each of them before comparing.
- amelius 1y agoHumans evolved to think the night sky is beautiful. That's also training. If humans were zapped by lightning every time they went outside at night, they would not think that a night sky is beautiful.
- spuz 1y agoInterestingly this is a question I've had for a while. Night brings potentially deadly cold, predators, a drastic limit in vision so why do we find the sunset and night sky beautiful. Why do we stop and watch the sun set - something that happens every day - rather than prepare for the food and warmth we need to survive the night?
- TeMPOraL 1y agoMaybe it's that we only pause to observe them and realize they're beautiful, when we're feeling safe enough? "Beautiful sunset" evokes being on a calm sea shore with a loved one, feeling safe. It does not evoke being on a farm and looking up while doing chores and wishing they'd be over already. It does not evoke being stranded on an island, half-starved to death.
- amelius 1y agoWe think it's beautiful because it's like a background that we don't have to think about. If that background were hostile, we'd have to think and we would not think it looks beautiful.
- delusional 1y agoYou're entering the domain of philosophy. There's a concept of "the sublime" that's been richly explored in literature. If you find the subject interesting, I'd recommend you starting with Immanuel Kant.
- ben_w 1y agoMy guess is that your framing presumes the opposite of the evolutionary reality. I think this time of day probably wasn't a big risk for us, that we were often the hunters and not just the hunted, and that the sense of beauty comes from — as the previous poster suggests — us having evolved to find it so. That said, I'm discovering from living very close to a lake for the last year that mosquitos are a right pain around sunset…
- ninetyninenine 1y agoGuys you realize that you can go to ChatGPT right now and it can generate an actual picture of the night sky because it has seen thousands of pictures and drawings of the actual night sky right? Your logic is flawed because your knowledge is outdated. LLMs are encoding visual data, not just “language” data.
- heyjamesknight 1y agoYou misunderstand how the multimodal piece works. The fundamental unit of encoding here is still semantic. Not the same in your mind: you don’t need to know the word for sunset to experience the sunset.
- ninetyninenine 1y agoNo you misunderstand the ground truth reality. The LLM doesn’t need words as input. It can output pictures from pictures. Semantic words don’t have to be part of the equation at all. Also you have to note that serialized one dimensional string encodings are universal. Anything on the face of the earth and the universe itself can be encoded into a sting of just two characters: one and zero. That’s means anything can be translated to a linear series of symbols and the LLM can be trained on it. The LLM can be trained on anything.
- heyjamesknight 1y agoThe multimodal architectures I’ve seen are still text at the layer between modalities. And the image embedding and text embedding are kept completely separate. Not like where your brain where single neurons are used in all sorts of things. Yes, they can generate images from images, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get anything meaningful without human instruction on top. Yes, serialized one dimensional strings can encode anything. But that’s just the message content. If I wrote down my genetic sequence on a piece of paper and dropped it in a bottle in the sea, I don’t need to worry about accidentally fathering any children.
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- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago> humans say the night sky is beautiful is because they see that it is True, but we could engineer AI to see that too, just as evolution has engineered us to see it. Our innate emotional responses to things has been honed by evolution to be adaptive, to serve a purpose, but the things that trigger these various responses are not going to be super specific. e.g. We may derive pleasure from eating a nice juicy peach, but that doesn't mean that is encoded in our DNA - it's going to be primarily the reaction to sugar/sweetness, a good source of energy, that we are reacting to. Similarly, we may have an emotional reaction to certain pieces of modern art or artistic expression, but clearly evolution has not selected for those specifically, but rather it is the artist triggering innate responses that evolved for reasons other than appreciation of art. It's hard to guess what innate responses, that were actually selected for, are being triggered by our response to the night sky, and I'm also not sure how much of our response is purely visual (beauty) as opposed to wonder or awe. Maybe it's an attraction to the unknown, or sense of size and opportunity, with these being the universals that are actually adaptive. In any case, if we figured out the specifics of our hard wired emotional reactions, that evolution as given us, then we could choose to engineer emotional AI that had those same reactions, in just as genuine a way as we do, if we chose to.