4 ms·
The comment about Wikipedia supposedly putting companies out of business is so goofy I'm not even gonna comment on it. I'm surprised you'd bother trying to make
by scuff3d 1y ago
The comment about Wikipedia supposedly putting companies out of business is so goofy I'm not even gonna comment on it. I'm surprised you'd bother trying to make a point there.
The difference is humans have a concept of truth, humans have intent. A person, taking an aggregation of their research, expertise, and experience to produce an article is (presumably) trying to produce something factual. Other humans then come along, with similar intent, and verify it. Studies in the past have shown Wikipedia's accuracy rate is roughly on par with traditional encyclopedias, and more importantly sources are clearly documented. Making validation and further research fairly easy. And if something isn't sourced I know immediately it's more suspect.
LLMs have no concept of truth, they have no "intent". They just slap words down based on statistics. It is admittedly very impressive how good they are at doing that, but they don't produce truth in any meaningful way, it more a by product. On top of that all its sources get smashed together, making it much more difficult to verify the validity of any given claim. It's also unpredictable, so the exact same prompt could produce truth one time, and a hallucination another (a situation I have run into when it comes to engineering tasks). And worst of all. Not only will an LLM be wrong, but it will be confidently and persuasively wrong.
- mmooss 1y ago> The comment about Wikipedia supposedly putting companies out of business is so goofy I'm not even gonna comment on it. I've learned that when people don't have any merits to argue, they turn to ridicule. Right back at you buddy. > The difference is humans have a concept of truth, humans have intent. A person, taking an aggregation of their research, expertise, and experience to produce an article is (presumably) trying to produce something factual. It's pretty naive to think that humans have intent and motivation for the truth, and no others. Just look around you in the world - most communication disregards the truth either carelessly or incidentally (because they are motivated to believe or claim something else) or intentionally (lots of that). > LLMs have no concept of truth, they have no "intent". My calculator app has no intent or concept of truth, but outputs truth pretty reliably.
- scuff3d 1y agoTo think that I'm saying all humans intend to produce truth you'd have to intentionally misread my comment. Wikipedia obviously has to deal with bad actors and vandalism, and they have processes in place for that. My point is that the intent matters. Calculators aren't a useful analogy for LLMs. They produce a deterministic output based on a (relatively) narrow range of inputs. The calculations to produce those outputs follow very rigid and well defined rules. LLMs by their very nature are non-deterministic, and the inputs/outputs are far more complicated.
- mmooss 1y ago> Wikipedia obviously has to deal with bad actors and vandalism People produce false information for many reasons besides malice, and even when they intend to be honest. Look how much bad information was out there before the advent of scientific method.
- scuff3d 1y agoYou're aware that if you don't have anything useful or interesting to contribute to the conversation you can just not comment right?
- mmooss 1y agoThat's right: People turn to insults when they have nothing to say on the merits.
- scuff3d 1y agoIt's not an insult when it's true. I don't think you've made one comment that actually added something useful. I did my best to reply to what was there, but you didn't give me anything to work with. Your last comment was so unrelated there was no where left to go. If you have something actually relavent to say you're welcome to say it.