3 ms·

All these years later and the Eliza effect is as powerful as ever.

spwa4 6mo ago
You could reverse that argument. The only thing that ever happens in a human mind is a Sodium-Kalium semi-permeable membrane balancing out (meaning going from polarized to unpolarized) and triggering the tiniest of explosions spreading one of 4 chemicals around. Repeat a few billion times per second for ~80 years. The Eliza effect is off the scale. What I'm trying to say is that the underlying method is not a valid reason to discredit one thinking process over another.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- lamasery 6mo ago
  I remain baffled that anyone thinks dragging brains into discussions of these things does anything but make everyone more confused. This kind of thing is exactly what I'm getting at—that it's common for even people in the computer technology field to think the comparison is apt, or illuminates anything, is a wild indication of how inclined we are to be tricked by computer programs that happen to operate on language.
  - spwa4 6mo ago
    The point is, of course, that human thinking is also a physical process, build on basic building blocks.
  - Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
    Feeling is mutual, actually O:-) Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial are both variants of Anthropocentrism, and share the same limitations. Have you considered other axes of thought? I can readily admit that lots of humans will naively anthropomorphize horrendously, but I think that: - The eliza effect is not what people think it is - What is actually going on is obscured by all the anthropomorphizing - But this is yet no grounds to throw out the underlying phenomenon, especially when a) it can be useful and/or b) it causes people to get hurt.
  - stevenhuang 6mo ago
    You are baffled because of your own ignorance of the underlying principles under discussion. Do you believe in a dualist interpretation of reality, that the process of thinking is somehow nonphysical? That these programs operate on language is besides the point. The fact you think this is why it's interesting shows you don't even understand the argument. Are you familiar with the physical church turing thesis?
Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
The effect is not quite what you think it is, and people don't quite take the right lessons. Similar to the eliza effect, people still take the original reading of Clever Hans: "he couldn't really do maths, he's just taking social cues from his handler" But what's the actual difference between Eliza, Clever Hans and RLHF? They're doing the similar things, right? Now look at how we valued that in the 20th vs 21st century: How much does an ALU even cost anymore? even a really good one? (it's almost never separate anymore, usually on the same silicon as the rest of the cpu/microcontroller) Meanwhile... what's the TCO to deploy a sentiment classifier? Especially a really good one?
onemoresoop 6mo ago
We also believe in supranatural things so it’s no wonder we assign sentience so easily.
SAI_Peregrinus 6mo ago
I fell for it a few minutes the other day. Debugging an issue with a device, the AI wrote "I have a strong hypothesis about the cause in the code". I asked it to write out the hypothesis & create a test plan to validate it. It made a test plan, but no hypothesis. The test plan did not reproduce the issue, and it turned out to be a hardware design problem not in the code at all. But for a moment in there I thought it actually had a hypothesis, I forgot that it's not thinking beyond what's written in the chat. Someone who was going to reproduce & fix a bug would probably write "I have a strong hypothesis about the cause" or similar, so it played along & wrote that.
- Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
  If the hypothesis is not printed out in the context, then it cannot hold it past that turn. You could prompt it to generate said hypothesis first (or set of hypotheses), and only then act on them. And then things might work. Definitely not exactly a human. OTOH Low hanging fruit is low.

spwa4 6mo ago

You could reverse that argument. The only thing that ever happens in a human mind is a Sodium-Kalium semi-permeable membrane balancing out (meaning going from polarized to unpolarized) and triggering the tiniest of explosions spreading one of 4 chemicals around. Repeat a few billion times per second for ~80 years. The Eliza effect is off the scale. What I'm trying to say is that the underlying method is not a valid reason to discredit one thinking process over another.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
lamasery 6mo ago
I remain baffled that anyone thinks dragging brains into discussions of these things does anything but make everyone more confused. This kind of thing is exactly what I'm getting at—that it's common for even people in the computer technology field to think the comparison is apt, or illuminates anything, is a wild indication of how inclined we are to be tricked by computer programs that happen to operate on language.
- spwa4 6mo ago
  The point is, of course, that human thinking is also a physical process, build on basic building blocks.
- Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
  Feeling is mutual, actually O:-) Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial are both variants of Anthropocentrism, and share the same limitations. Have you considered other axes of thought? I can readily admit that lots of humans will naively anthropomorphize horrendously, but I think that: - The eliza effect is not what people think it is - What is actually going on is obscured by all the anthropomorphizing - But this is yet no grounds to throw out the underlying phenomenon, especially when a) it can be useful and/or b) it causes people to get hurt.
- stevenhuang 6mo ago
  You are baffled because of your own ignorance of the underlying principles under discussion. Do you believe in a dualist interpretation of reality, that the process of thinking is somehow nonphysical? That these programs operate on language is besides the point. The fact you think this is why it's interesting shows you don't even understand the argument. Are you familiar with the physical church turing thesis?

Kim_Bruning 6mo ago

The effect is not quite what you think it is, and people don't quite take the right lessons. Similar to the eliza effect, people still take the original reading of Clever Hans: "he couldn't really do maths, he's just taking social cues from his handler" But what's the actual difference between Eliza, Clever Hans and RLHF? They're doing the similar things, right? Now look at how we valued that in the 20th vs 21st century: How much does an ALU even cost anymore? even a really good one? (it's almost never separate anymore, usually on the same silicon as the rest of the cpu/microcontroller) Meanwhile... what's the TCO to deploy a sentiment classifier? Especially a really good one?

onemoresoop 6mo ago

We also believe in supranatural things so it’s no wonder we assign sentience so easily.

SAI_Peregrinus 6mo ago

I fell for it a few minutes the other day. Debugging an issue with a device, the AI wrote "I have a strong hypothesis about the cause in the code". I asked it to write out the hypothesis & create a test plan to validate it. It made a test plan, but no hypothesis. The test plan did not reproduce the issue, and it turned out to be a hardware design problem not in the code at all. But for a moment in there I thought it actually had a hypothesis, I forgot that it's not thinking beyond what's written in the chat. Someone who was going to reproduce & fix a bug would probably write "I have a strong hypothesis about the cause" or similar, so it played along & wrote that.

Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
If the hypothesis is not printed out in the context, then it cannot hold it past that turn. You could prompt it to generate said hypothesis first (or set of hypotheses), and only then act on them. And then things might work. Definitely not exactly a human. OTOH Low hanging fruit is low.