7 ms·

i don't get what the point of what you are saying is? i can ask it to explain how to solve an integral right now with steps. i can ask it to tell me how to wri

i don't get what the point of what you are saying is? i can ask it to explain how to solve an integral right now with steps. i can ask it to tell me how to write like a person X right now.

Planktonne 8mo ago
"Explain how to solve" and "write like X" are crucially different tasks. One of them is about going through the steps of a process, and the other is about mimicking the result of a process.
- simianwords 8mo ago
  but llm can do both. so what's the point? can you give a specific example of what an llm can't do? be specific so we can test it.
  - plewd 8mo ago
    like OP originally said, the LLM doesn't have access to the actual process of the author, only the completed/refined output. Not sure why you need a concrete example to "test", but just think about the fact that the LLM has no idea how a writer brainstorms, re-iterates on their work, or even comes up with the ideas in the first place.
    - simianwords 8mo ago
      i don't buy this logic. if i have studied an author greatly i will be able to recognise patterns and be able to write like them. ex: i read a lot of shakespeare, understand patterns, understand where he came from, his biography and i will be able to write like him. why is it different for an LLM? i again don't get what the point is?
      - TimorousBestie 8mo ago
        This is the plot of a short story of Borges’ called “Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote.”
        Planktonne 8mo ago
        There's a relatively common pattern of "new tech idea => Borges already explained why that approach is conceptually flawed".
      - tovej 8mo ago
        You can understand his biography and analyses about how shakespeare might have written. You can apply this knowledge to modify your writing process. The LLM does not model text at this meta-level. It can only use those texts as examples, it cannot apply what is written there to it's generation process.
        simianwords 8mo ago
        no it does and what you said is easily falsifiable. can you provide a _single_ example where LLM might fail? lets test this now.
        tovej 8mo ago
        Yes, what I said should be falsifiable. The burden is on you to give me an example, but I can give you an idea. You need to show me an LLM applying writing techniques do not have examples in its corpus. You would have to use some relatively unknown author, I can suggest Iida Turpeinen. There will be interviews of her describing her writing technique, but no examples that aren't from Elolliset (Beasts of the sea). Find an interview where Turpeinen describes her method for writing Beasts of the Sea, e.g.: https://suffolkcommunitylibraries.co.uk/meet-the-author-iida-turpeinen/ https://suffolkcommunitylibraries.co.uk/meet-the-author-iida... Now ask it to produce a short story about a topic unrelated to Beasts of the Sea, let's say a book about the moonlanding. A human doing this exercise will produce a text with the same feel as Beasts of the Sea, but an LLM-produced text will have nothing in common with it.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - empath75 8mo ago
      > has no idea how a writer brainstorms This isn't true in general, and not even true in many specific cases, because a great deal of writers have described the process of writing in detail and all of that is in their training data. Claude and chatgpt very much know how novels are written, and you can go into claude code and tell it you want to write a novel and it'll walk you through quite a lot of it -- worldbuilding, characters, plotting, timelines, etc. It's very true that LLMs are not good at "ideas" to begin with, though.
      - re-thc 8mo ago
        > because a great deal of writers have described the process of writing in detail And that's often inaccurate - just as much as asking startup founders how they came to be. Part of it is forgot, part of it is don't know how to describe it and part of it is don't want to tell you so.
      - AlotOfReading 8mo ago
        The distinction being made is the difference between intellectual knowledge and experience, not originality. Imagine a interviewing a particularly diligent new grad. They've memorized every textbook and best practices book they can find. Will that alone make them a senior+ developer, or do they need a few years learning all the ways reality is more complicated than the curriculum? LLMs aren't even to that level yet.
      - GCA10 8mo ago
        Professional writer here. On our longer work, we go through multiple iterations, with lots of teardowns and recalibrations based on feedback from early, private readers, professional editors, pop culture -- and who knows. You won't find very clear explanations of how this happens, even in writers' attempts to explain their craft. We don't systematize it, and unless we keep detailed in-process logs (doubtful), we can't even reconstruct it. It's certainly possible to mimic many aspects of a notable writer's published style. ("Bad Hemingway" contests have been a jokey delight for decades.) But on the sliding scale of ingenious-to-obnoxious uses for AI, this Grammarly/Superhuman idea feels uniquely misguided.
    - JCharante 8mo ago
      why not? datasets are not only finished works, there's datasets that go into the process they're just available in smaller quantities
      - elmomle 8mo ago
        Let's take the work of Raymond Carver as just one example. He would type drafts which would go through repeated iteration with a massive amount of hand-written markup, revision and excision by his editor. To really recreate his writing style, you would need the notes he started with for himself, the drafts that never even made it to his editor, the drafts that did make to the editor, all the edits made, and the final product, all properly sequenced and encoded as data. In theory, one could munge this data and train an LLM and it would probably get significantly better at writing terse prose where there are actually coherent, deep things going on in the underlying story (more generally, this is complicated by the fact that many authors intentionally destroy notes so their work can stand on its own--and this gives them another reason to do so). But until that's done, you're going to get LLMs replicating style without the deep cohesion that makes such writing rewarding to read.
        simianwords 8mo ago
        Can a human replicate style without understanding process? Yes we can. We do it all the time with Shakespeare. Why not LLMs? I can do it at the moment with Shakespeare an LLMs.
        Planktonne 8mo ago
        Mimicking the style of Shakespeare does not produce anything close to work with the quality of Shakespeare.
        mold_aid 8mo ago
        A good point. "Famous author" is a marketing term for Grammarly here; it's easy to conceive of an "author" as being an individual that we associate with a finite set of published works, all of which contain data. But authors have not done this work alone. Grammarly is not going to sell "get advice from the editorial team at Vintage" or "Grammarly requires your wife to type the thing out first, though" I'll also note that no human would probably want advice from the living versions of the author themselves.
- z2 8mo ago
  Neural networks most certainly go through a process to transform input into output (even to mimic the results of another process) but it's a very different one from human neutral networks. But I think this is the crucial point of the debate, essentially unchanged from Searle's "Chinese Room" argument from decades ago. The person in that room, looking up a dictionary with Chinese phrases and patterns, certainly follows a process, but it's easy to dismiss the notion that the person understands Chinese. But the question is if you zoom out, is the room itself intelligent because it is following a process, even if it's just a bunch of pattern recognition?
mysterydip 8mo ago
Is the reason it can show steps for solving an integral because the training set contained webpages or books showing how to do it?
- simianwords 8mo ago
  if we have steps for understanding any author's english and creative process (generally not specific to an author) would you agree then it is possible for an llm to do it?
  - mysterydip 8mo ago
    Repeating a process, yes for sure, even (pseudorandom?) variations on a process. Understanding a process is a different question, and I’m not sure how you would measure that. In school we would have a test with various questions to show you understand the concept of addition, for example. But while my calculator can perfectly add any numbers up to its memory limit, it has no understanding of addition.
    - simianwords 8mo ago
      It’s the degree of generalisability. And LLMs do have understanding. You can ask it how it came up with the process in natural language and it can help - something a calculator can’t do.
      - bigfishrunning 8mo ago
        > And LLMs do have understanding. They absolutely do not. If you "ask it how it came up with the process in natural language" with some input, it will produce an output that follows, because of the statistics encoded in the model. That output may or may not be helpful, but it is likely to be stylistically plausible. An LLM does not think or understand; it is merely a statistical model (that's what the M stands for!)
        simianwords 8mo ago
RobRivera 8mo ago
Actually this is the crux and the nuance which makes discussing LLM specifics a pain in the general space. If you built an LLM exclusively on the writings and letters of John Steinbeck, you could NOT tell the LLM to solve an integral for you amd expect it to be right. Instead what you will receive is a text that follows a statistically derived most likely (in accordance to the perplexity tuning) response to such a question.
- netdevphoenix 8mo ago
  > If you built an LLM exclusively on the writings and letters of John Steinbeck, you could NOT tell the LLM to solve an integral for you amd expect it to be right. Isn't this obvious? There is not enough latent knowledge of math there to enable current LLMs to approximate anything resembling an integral.
  - RobRivera 8mo ago
    Its obvious to me. Its obvious to you. It isnt obvious to the person I am responding to, and it isnt obvious to majority of individuals I speak with on the matter (which is why AI, personally, is in the bucket of religion amd politics for polite conversation to simply avoid)
    - kenjackson 8mo ago
      Wait -- I'm fairly certain this is obvious to the person you were responding to. It may not be obvious to a lay person (who may not even know LLMs are trained at all). But I think this is obvious to almost all people with even a small understanding of LLMs.
      - RobRivera 8mo ago
        I'm actually pretty convinced they're a troll or at the very least a high confrontation participant who is quick to move goal posts, ignore entire chains of logic, engage in ad hominim attacks of other posters, and is bringing zero novel insight anywhere in this thread
blargey 8mo ago
“i can ask it to give a text description of a linear logical math process that has been described in text countless times” If you think “the tacit knowledge and conscious/subconscious reasoning mix that caused X to write like X” can be meaningfully captured by some 1-page “style guide” like llmtropes, I’m not sure what to tell you. Such a style description would be informed by a soup of reviewers that most certainly cannot write like X even with their stronger and more nuanced observations than what the LLM picked up.

i don't get what the point of what you are saying is? i can ask it to explain how to solve an integral right now with steps. i can ask it to tell me how to write like a person X right now.

Planktonne 8mo ago

"Explain how to solve" and "write like X" are crucially different tasks. One of them is about going through the steps of a process, and the other is about mimicking the result of a process.

simianwords 8mo ago
but llm can do both. so what's the point? can you give a specific example of what an llm can't do? be specific so we can test it.
- plewd 8mo ago
  like OP originally said, the LLM doesn't have access to the actual process of the author, only the completed/refined output. Not sure why you need a concrete example to "test", but just think about the fact that the LLM has no idea how a writer brainstorms, re-iterates on their work, or even comes up with the ideas in the first place.
  - simianwords 8mo ago
    i don't buy this logic. if i have studied an author greatly i will be able to recognise patterns and be able to write like them. ex: i read a lot of shakespeare, understand patterns, understand where he came from, his biography and i will be able to write like him. why is it different for an LLM? i again don't get what the point is?
    - TimorousBestie 8mo ago
      This is the plot of a short story of Borges’ called “Pierre Menard, the Author of Don Quixote.”
      - Planktonne 8mo ago
        There's a relatively common pattern of "new tech idea => Borges already explained why that approach is conceptually flawed".
    - tovej 8mo ago
      You can understand his biography and analyses about how shakespeare might have written. You can apply this knowledge to modify your writing process. The LLM does not model text at this meta-level. It can only use those texts as examples, it cannot apply what is written there to it's generation process.
      - simianwords 8mo ago
        no it does and what you said is easily falsifiable. can you provide a _single_ example where LLM might fail? lets test this now.
        tovej 8mo ago
        Yes, what I said should be falsifiable. The burden is on you to give me an example, but I can give you an idea. You need to show me an LLM applying writing techniques do not have examples in its corpus. You would have to use some relatively unknown author, I can suggest Iida Turpeinen. There will be interviews of her describing her writing technique, but no examples that aren't from Elolliset (Beasts of the sea). Find an interview where Turpeinen describes her method for writing Beasts of the Sea, e.g.: https://suffolkcommunitylibraries.co.uk/meet-the-author-iida-turpeinen/ https://suffolkcommunitylibraries.co.uk/meet-the-author-iida... Now ask it to produce a short story about a topic unrelated to Beasts of the Sea, let's say a book about the moonlanding. A human doing this exercise will produce a text with the same feel as Beasts of the Sea, but an LLM-produced text will have nothing in common with it.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - empath75 8mo ago
    > has no idea how a writer brainstorms This isn't true in general, and not even true in many specific cases, because a great deal of writers have described the process of writing in detail and all of that is in their training data. Claude and chatgpt very much know how novels are written, and you can go into claude code and tell it you want to write a novel and it'll walk you through quite a lot of it -- worldbuilding, characters, plotting, timelines, etc. It's very true that LLMs are not good at "ideas" to begin with, though.
    - re-thc 8mo ago
      > because a great deal of writers have described the process of writing in detail And that's often inaccurate - just as much as asking startup founders how they came to be. Part of it is forgot, part of it is don't know how to describe it and part of it is don't want to tell you so.
    - AlotOfReading 8mo ago
      The distinction being made is the difference between intellectual knowledge and experience, not originality. Imagine a interviewing a particularly diligent new grad. They've memorized every textbook and best practices book they can find. Will that alone make them a senior+ developer, or do they need a few years learning all the ways reality is more complicated than the curriculum? LLMs aren't even to that level yet.
    - GCA10 8mo ago
      Professional writer here. On our longer work, we go through multiple iterations, with lots of teardowns and recalibrations based on feedback from early, private readers, professional editors, pop culture -- and who knows. You won't find very clear explanations of how this happens, even in writers' attempts to explain their craft. We don't systematize it, and unless we keep detailed in-process logs (doubtful), we can't even reconstruct it. It's certainly possible to mimic many aspects of a notable writer's published style. ("Bad Hemingway" contests have been a jokey delight for decades.) But on the sliding scale of ingenious-to-obnoxious uses for AI, this Grammarly/Superhuman idea feels uniquely misguided.
  - JCharante 8mo ago
    why not? datasets are not only finished works, there's datasets that go into the process they're just available in smaller quantities
    - elmomle 8mo ago
      Let's take the work of Raymond Carver as just one example. He would type drafts which would go through repeated iteration with a massive amount of hand-written markup, revision and excision by his editor. To really recreate his writing style, you would need the notes he started with for himself, the drafts that never even made it to his editor, the drafts that did make to the editor, all the edits made, and the final product, all properly sequenced and encoded as data. In theory, one could munge this data and train an LLM and it would probably get significantly better at writing terse prose where there are actually coherent, deep things going on in the underlying story (more generally, this is complicated by the fact that many authors intentionally destroy notes so their work can stand on its own--and this gives them another reason to do so). But until that's done, you're going to get LLMs replicating style without the deep cohesion that makes such writing rewarding to read.
      - simianwords 8mo ago
        Can a human replicate style without understanding process? Yes we can. We do it all the time with Shakespeare. Why not LLMs? I can do it at the moment with Shakespeare an LLMs.
        Planktonne 8mo ago
        Mimicking the style of Shakespeare does not produce anything close to work with the quality of Shakespeare.
      - mold_aid 8mo ago
        A good point. "Famous author" is a marketing term for Grammarly here; it's easy to conceive of an "author" as being an individual that we associate with a finite set of published works, all of which contain data. But authors have not done this work alone. Grammarly is not going to sell "get advice from the editorial team at Vintage" or "Grammarly requires your wife to type the thing out first, though" I'll also note that no human would probably want advice from the living versions of the author themselves.
z2 8mo ago
Neural networks most certainly go through a process to transform input into output (even to mimic the results of another process) but it's a very different one from human neutral networks. But I think this is the crucial point of the debate, essentially unchanged from Searle's "Chinese Room" argument from decades ago. The person in that room, looking up a dictionary with Chinese phrases and patterns, certainly follows a process, but it's easy to dismiss the notion that the person understands Chinese. But the question is if you zoom out, is the room itself intelligent because it is following a process, even if it's just a bunch of pattern recognition?

mysterydip 8mo ago

Is the reason it can show steps for solving an integral because the training set contained webpages or books showing how to do it?

simianwords 8mo ago
if we have steps for understanding any author's english and creative process (generally not specific to an author) would you agree then it is possible for an llm to do it?
- mysterydip 8mo ago
  Repeating a process, yes for sure, even (pseudorandom?) variations on a process. Understanding a process is a different question, and I’m not sure how you would measure that. In school we would have a test with various questions to show you understand the concept of addition, for example. But while my calculator can perfectly add any numbers up to its memory limit, it has no understanding of addition.
  - simianwords 8mo ago
    It’s the degree of generalisability. And LLMs do have understanding. You can ask it how it came up with the process in natural language and it can help - something a calculator can’t do.
    - bigfishrunning 8mo ago
      > And LLMs do have understanding. They absolutely do not. If you "ask it how it came up with the process in natural language" with some input, it will produce an output that follows, because of the statistics encoded in the model. That output may or may not be helpful, but it is likely to be stylistically plausible. An LLM does not think or understand; it is merely a statistical model (that's what the M stands for!)
      - simianwords 8mo ago

RobRivera 8mo ago

Actually this is the crux and the nuance which makes discussing LLM specifics a pain in the general space. If you built an LLM exclusively on the writings and letters of John Steinbeck, you could NOT tell the LLM to solve an integral for you amd expect it to be right. Instead what you will receive is a text that follows a statistically derived most likely (in accordance to the perplexity tuning) response to such a question.

netdevphoenix 8mo ago
> If you built an LLM exclusively on the writings and letters of John Steinbeck, you could NOT tell the LLM to solve an integral for you amd expect it to be right. Isn't this obvious? There is not enough latent knowledge of math there to enable current LLMs to approximate anything resembling an integral.
- RobRivera 8mo ago
  Its obvious to me. Its obvious to you. It isnt obvious to the person I am responding to, and it isnt obvious to majority of individuals I speak with on the matter (which is why AI, personally, is in the bucket of religion amd politics for polite conversation to simply avoid)
  - kenjackson 8mo ago
    Wait -- I'm fairly certain this is obvious to the person you were responding to. It may not be obvious to a lay person (who may not even know LLMs are trained at all). But I think this is obvious to almost all people with even a small understanding of LLMs.
    - RobRivera 8mo ago
      I'm actually pretty convinced they're a troll or at the very least a high confrontation participant who is quick to move goal posts, ignore entire chains of logic, engage in ad hominim attacks of other posters, and is bringing zero novel insight anywhere in this thread

blargey 8mo ago

“i can ask it to give a text description of a linear logical math process that has been described in text countless times” If you think “the tacit knowledge and conscious/subconscious reasoning mix that caused X to write like X” can be meaningfully captured by some 1-page “style guide” like llmtropes, I’m not sure what to tell you. Such a style description would be informed by a soup of reviewers that most certainly cannot write like X even with their stronger and more nuanced observations than what the LLM picked up.