4 ms·

Like the old proverb: "The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all."

• bitwize 2mo ago
  Indeed. LLMs resemble human intelligence in more or less the same way that the output of the TI-99/4A speech synthesizer resembles a human voice.
  • freehorse 2mo ago
    I also believed that, but seeing qwen 27b overengineering solutions in a bit too familiar way in the article, I started doubting that.
  • coldtea 2mo ago
    Not if an LLM over chat can fool most people they're talking to a human (which it can), where the TI-99 speech synthesizer voice absolutely can not.
    • shafyy 2mo ago
      Can it? I feel like I instantly recognize if I am chatting with an LLM or a human
      • tapland 2mo ago
        Can't even tell if you're real or a bot by reading one comment. Great times!
      • IMTDb 2mo ago
        Emphasis on "feel"
      • piva00 2mo ago
        I was quite surprised on how difficult it is to tell when chatting with an uncensored LLM a friend is running (it's too big to run on any of my computers but he got some B200s). You can input your own "system prompt" to make it behave like a normal internet user and the prose writes very similarly to internet comments with none of the LLMisms from ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc.
        • shafyy 2mo ago
          Yes, I'm sure it's possible to get LLMs to respond more like an average human would.
      • coldtea 2mo ago
        "Feel" is doing a lot of work here. You can recognize 70% of those (true positive rate) and still have a false negative rate of 30%, while thinking you got 100% of the AI ones! The problem is that you'd be oblivious to those you don't recognize.
        • raducu 2mo ago
          But the Turing test involves a conversation you can steer and I think that's where indeed it's a lot easier to smell LLMs.
        • shafyy 2mo ago
          70%? Are we just making up numbers now?
    • zahlman 2mo ago
      > Not if an LLM over chat can fool most people they're talking to a human (which it can) I keep hearing this claim, and yet I keep seeing LLM output which is trivially distinguished from human writing. I really can't understand how this gap persists; but then, there seem to have been at least some people who couldn't sniff out ELIZA, back in the day, too.
      • coldtea 2mo ago
        >I keep hearing this claim, and yet I keep seeing LLM output which is trivially distinguished from human writing. That's mostly true for longer LLM output with all the sycophancy / LinkedIn bias thrown in. Make it casual conversation or comments, and give it instructions on appearing casual, or even better kill the censoring and fixed-prompt (with an open model), and it's orders of magnitude more difficult, unless if you suspect it and try specifically tailored prompts to sniff it. There's no shortage of people obliviously discussing with AI bots in comment sections.
        • zahlman 2mo ago
          At the bottom of this very submission are a bunch of dead comments that are very obviously LLM-generated.
          • akie 2mo ago
            Ok, you and I can easily spot LLM text. So what? The Turing test has still been passed, as is clear by people falling in love with ChatGPT, not believing something is AI, and by continuously claiming this or that is a bot. People, many of them at least, cannot make this distinction anymore. You can, I can, but people as a whole are having problems with that.
            • bluebarbet 2mo ago
              >You can, I can Even this (assuming it's even true) will likely not be true in some near-term future. >continuously claiming this or that is a bot I see it as a contemporary form of religious thinking. Like (say) pilgrims seeing blood on a statue of the virgin, plenty of people are now seeing the hand of AI in everything they read. If you want to see something hard enough, it tends to become magically visible.
    • Tade0 2mo ago
      Does that mean it's intelligent? To me it just means they can brilliantly fake human conversation - the original design goal of Large Language Models. It's really easy to tell if you're talking to an LLM if you ask a question that requires actually knowing things, not going for the first search result of a tool call or whatever most popular answer was embedded in the weights. For this reason even the most sophisticated models still require system prompts, skills and all that other crap.
      • bonoboTP 2mo ago
        Most people are already at the anger phase, not at denial anymore. Get on with the times.
      • snapcaster 2mo ago
        Why does this matter?
        • Tade0 2mo ago
          We're checking for intelligence, not faking intelligence, no?
          • snapcaster 2mo ago
            no, we're trying to do work effectively and quickly
      • coldtea 2mo ago
        >Does that mean it's intelligent? To me it just means they can brilliantly fake human conversation That's exactly the criteria we used to assume for over half a century for it finally being intelligent: the Turing Test. And what does "brilliantly fake human conversation" even mean if not some kind of intelligence? It's like saying "He is not good at math, he just brilliantly proves theorems".
  • tiahura 2mo ago
    Find memories of the prank phone call marathons during the summer of 85 when my friend got the speech synthesizer for his TI-99.