4 ms·
>This is the root of AI psychosis. There’s a lot of unpack here, and I won’t go too deep because you can’t really have a discussion with affected folks because
by operatingthetan 3mo ago
>This is the root of AI psychosis. There’s a lot of unpack here, and I won’t go too deep because you can’t really have a discussion with affected folks because their fundamental basis is not evidence, it’s belief. Treating it as if it is an intelligence is the problem.
The problem is that AI psychosis is fundamentally the belief that an LLM is "thinking" at all. Outputs are just believable word vomit which resembles factual information.
- singpolyma3 3mo agoThat presumes that we have a definition of "thinking" or that we know that anything is "thinking" when in fact neither is true. The problem is real but I don't think positing a philosophical root is helpful
- operatingthetan 3mo agoThe claim that we are assigning human-like agency to a machine with none is simple and factual.
- ForceBru 3mo agoWhat's "thinking"? What's "agency"? What's "human-like agency"? If "agency" is making decisions and performing corresponding actions in the real world, then LLMs most definitely LOOK LIKE they're making decisions (what's the next token? which tool to use? what's to say, in general? what idea to convey?) and performing actions (tool use). Can we tell whether they are ACTUALLY making decisions? Well, are the people around me "actually" making decisions? Or are they simply pushed around by circumstances and external forces? Am I actually making decisions? Did I like DECIDE to write this comment? Maybe? I have no clue...
- operatingthetan 3mo agoI think you're mildly obfuscating the issues at hand by diving too deeply into philosophical questions. It's quite simple, the agency that the LLM appears to have is actually your own. Without a prompt an LLM does nothing. It has no thoughts between prompts about you or your problems.
- aspenmartin 3mo agoYou are implying definitions that don't seem to be mainstream; thinking is internally manipulating information to reason, infer, plan, solve problems, and form judgments or beliefs. Also -- "Without a prompt an LLM does nothing. It has no thoughts between prompts about you or your problems." it sounds like you paint this like it's something fundamental? It isn't. Nothing is stopping you from streaming information to an LLM and letting it process this information, this is precisely what people are trying to build.
- operatingthetan 3mo agoThe machines have no driving force to act in the world. That is fundamental for humans. Twice in your comment you suggest things that you think that I believe, please do not do this.
- aspenmartin 3mo ago“It sounds like you believe” is a question, inviting your clarification. I will continue doing that because it’s perfectly reasonable. Also “machines have no driving force to act in the world” is also a mysterious statement but because you reacted so badly to anyone questioning you I will just leave it at that
- operatingthetan 3mo agoThat is called a leading question and it is not "perfectly reasonable." Resisting your attempts at bad faith discussion is not "reacting badly." I agree though that we should cease discussion.
- ForceBru 3mo agoYes, I'm diving a bit too deeply because I don't really know what "thinking" is and therefore I don't understand how we can so confidently say that LLMs don't think, even though they definitely LOOK like they're thinking. They even have a "Thinking" section in their responses! If I say that a rock doesn't think, it's pretty convincing: does a rock look like it's thinking? No — it doesn't even do anything! But an LLM does look like it's thinking, at least while generating a response. When it's "offline" it's just a bunch of "dead" bytes, sure. So when it's not active, not responding to a prompt, it's of course not thinking. I'm pretty sure nobody actually questions this. Is your computer "thinking" when it's powered off? Can a piece of metal think? Probably not. So there are no thoughts between prompts, this seems obvious. Thus, this is a question of "discrete time vs continuous time". LLMs "live" from prompt to prompt. Humans are alive continuously. In some sense, we're prompted by a lot of things all the time. As I'm writing this, I'm seeing stuff, I'm hearing stuff, I can feel various parts of my body, I'm thinking about my problems, my goals, other people's problems and goals, etc. When I'm in a sensory deprivation tank, my brain keeps "entertaining" me by "self-prompting", like a recurrent neural network (I guess it literally is a massive RNN). So it seems like your definition of "thinking" hinges upon the LLMs being discrete-time and single-threaded (can't think about multiple things in parallel). IMO a more interesting question is whether an LLM is thinking WHILE IT'S GENERATING A RESPONSE, while it's "alive".
- singpolyma3 3mo agoThe idea that humans have agency is supernatural thinking imo
- operatingthetan 3mo agoA free will versus determinism argument doesn't really have a place here. Consider instead that humans factually have 'the illusion of agency.' The LLM does not even that have that. It cannot act on it's own, it has no ongoing drama or intention. It only reacts to prompts.
- keeda 3mo agoWait, where are we assigning human-like agency in this case? Agency to me means the ability to do something by itself. Here the LLM is not doing anything, it is just responding with information to queries from people, that those people may then act on. (Which you can say about Google searches too, yet we don't ascribe agency to Google.)
- corndoge 3mo agoOften times the words produced do have legitimate factual information though. It's less psychosis and more a confluence of well known human tendencies - salience bias, automation bias, etc.
- operatingthetan 3mo agoThe big problem is often times they don't as well. That's why we can't rely on them.
- aspenmartin 3mo agoSame with humans? Doctors, scientists...if a tool has any error rate above zero its not reliable?
- aetherson 3mo agoYou're confusing the training method with the internal process. If I had you repeatedly attempt to learn how to make believable completions of partial documents about a given topic, you would eventually learn things about that topic and could use your knowledge to create more believable completions of documents about that topic.
- operatingthetan 3mo agoLLMs do not learn. You put it out to pasture and create a new one. "Memory" in a session is essentially a context window party trick.
- aspenmartin 3mo agoThey do learn in context, and very sample efficiently. Continual learning is active area of research and we sort of already have something resembling it with persistent context. So yes they do learn.
- operatingthetan 3mo agoI consider that to be the illusion of learning. You are not wrong, I think they may actually learn in the future though. But not today.
- aspenmartin 3mo agoThat’s strange to me, what would you define as learning?
- FromTheFirstIn 3mo agoTo acquire new knowledge and build your understanding. They don’t understand so they can’t learn
- operatingthetan 3mo ago