4 ms·
I see this line of reasoning quite a bit and it’s a strange one to me. The arguer reduces the sheer complexity of human intelligence and language by saying “we
by ddj231 1mo ago
I see this line of reasoning quite a bit and it’s a strange one to me. The arguer reduces the sheer complexity of human intelligence and language by saying “we are just running statistical models in our brains” and by doing so makes the leap that Llms are intelligent. It’s an incredible simplification of the human person, who has a deep inner life, a soul, desires, and a will.
I don’t think the aversion to llms as intelligent has to do with the economics of paying intelligent agents more. I’d argue that it’s more fundamental than that. Humans are incredibly complex, and the world of sharing invisible things called knowledge, and the intelligent persons consuming such things which has been going on for thousands of years is far more rich than these synthetic outputs.
When it comes down to it the ai has no inner life, its is dead. A useful coding tool sure. But I wouldn’t call it intelligent.
One side example is just how bad these llms are at artistry. Just saying whatever should statically come next is not good art—and the outputs show it.
- alchemism 1mo agoI tend to think of it in reverse: not that LLMs are intelligent, but that humans are more empty than we…think we are.
- jurgenburgen 1mo agoI think that reveals your cynicism more than it provides any useful insight about intelligence.
- alexalx666 1mo agoNo, it reveals that he is older than you. Not every insight needs to be useful.
- jurgenburgen 1mo ago> Not every insight needs to be useful. Don’t they still need to be correct to be an insight? I don’t share his cynical opinion that “humans are more empty than we…think we are”.
- alchemism 1mo agoIf it helps I intended “empty” in a positive Zen sort of way, not as in an abyss. The humanness is in the listener, not the inner talker.
- curvaturearth 1mo agoWow I guess it takes one to know one?
- type0 1mo agoLLM is a probabilistic moron machine, it's virtually undistinguishable from a non-probabilistic human moron
- ojo-rojo 1mo agoYou mention LLMs are dead and don't have the complexity or inner life that people do. Is your opinion that these kinds of things are not possible for AI in general, or that these things might be possible but we're just not there yet with modern LLMs? You mentioned LLMs don't have souls, desire, or a will. I imagine those latter two can be engineered, no?
- BoredomIsFun 1mo ago> I imagine those latter two can be engineered, no? Ultimately yes, but not in modern AI systems.
- ojo-rojo 1mo agoI'm in the same boat, I think some aspects can be engineered, like intention and desire. I'm really curious if it's possible to go the full distance and make AI have experience like we do.
- BoredomIsFun 1mo ago> make AI have experience like we do. We'll probably have to go analog for that. The only known systems that certainly can experience are mammals (with apparently analog brains).
- tripzilch 1mo agoWell they're language models. You can't capture the human experience in language. Simple as that. > Is your opinion that these kinds of things are not possible for AI in general, or that these things might be possible but we're just not there yet with modern LLMs? I used to be on the side of "we're just not there yet [with AI in general]", but after seeing people's response to an algorithm optimized to tickle just their language instinct, I'm actually a little bit more on the fence about it.
- ddj231 1mo agoMy view is that these sorts of things are not possible for AI in general. Though we can create things and name them “will” and “desire”. Software deals with metaphors. Your Amazon shopping cart is a metaphor of a real shopping cart. You your desktop and your file system, etc. are metaphors of real items. But we don’t mistake the metaphor for its object, even from inanimate objects to their software counterparts (shopping cart to Amazon cart). Now the metaphors are dealing with humanness, things like intelligence etc. And rather than seeing it as software doing what it always does, taking things and creating software metaphors of them, we are starting to say these are actually what they are named. Saying the artificial intelligence is actually an intelligence. We’d either have to reduce the definition of intelligence such that calculators are intelligent. Or admit that these tools are not intelligent and are rather ways of exploring the work of actual intelligent beings, work that is found in their training data.