3 ms·

Could you define (or link) to what "Weizenbaum feed" means/references? Too obscure for me but I'm interested. Thanks.

• fweimer 6d ago
  Likely a reference to ELIZA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
  • handoflixue 6d ago
    Are there really people that can't tell the difference between ELIZA and something that can solve open Millennium Prize Problems in math?
    • joquarky 6d ago
      Their ego doesn't let them see the difference.
      • mapontosevenths 6d ago
        Or perhaps their wallets. There are a lot of programmers here. Some of them think that AI is the death of their profession, rather than a change in it. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
        • jsrozner 6d ago
          I, uhm, think this idea would apply in both directions.
        • abustamam 6d ago
          I was a programmer. AI is the evolution of my career. I'm in an interesting place. I've never been good at interviewing and I have certainly only gotten worse due to an admitted atrophy of thinking in "code." But I've been putting more effort in designing systems (agentic and otherwise) and building things at work as for fun. It's been an absolute boon to finally build out all of the fun side projects I had always dreamed of, and after showing one off to some people I might even be able to monetize. On the other hand I acknowledge that other people dont want to embrace LLM driven development for one reason or another, and I respect that. People got into the industry for different reasons , but code was always just a means to an ends for me.
    • jsrozner 6d ago
      It turns out, oddly enough, that it's possible for it to be both. AI can simultaneously be used to destroy the commons with slop and also make contributions to new math (though isn't the jury still out on whether part of the idea was stolen from human mathematicians?)
      • handoflixue 6d ago
        What does "destroy the commons with slop" have to do with ELIZA comparisons?
        • jsrozner 6d ago
          The people producing and consuming the slop don't realize that it is slop.
          • jdiff 6d ago
            In an embarrassing display, the manager over my arm of the company got told off by his manager for spamming him (and clients) with AI slop emails. And then was told by one of the regional managers for using Copilot generating a bunch of client-facing posters and images with phrasing that had not passed any sort of legal or basic fact checking. The people going all in on it don't realize the downsides, limitations, or understand how they come off to other people with it all.
    • esikich 6d ago
      Yes, AI threatens the folks who think that knowing how to write JavaScript or C makes them smart and being smart is their entire identity.
      • daveguy 6d ago
        LLM chatbots are software designed to manipulate, addict, and mine data. Just like social media before it. But anyone who bothers to read the output in a domain they understand will discover they aren't all that no matter who OpenAI steals research from.
      • BoorishBears 6d ago
        I think people who make being smart their whole identity are a out to use AI to turn the rest of the population into indentured servants. The comparison between ELIZA and LLMs is valid you boil it down to "humans evolved for 6-7 million years, had spoken language for 500k years, but have only had something non-human that could generate convincingly novel language well enough to hold a conversation for a few decades". There's no inherent reason it can't turn out having a non-human generate convincing enough language for conversation isn't a complete evolutionary blindspot the same way the short form feed has pretty much one-shotted society...
    • angoragoats 6d ago
      Humans solved the open math problems.
    • MisterMunchkin 6d ago
      They had to solve the car wash problem by hardcoding the solution in. The AI equivalent of adding another IF statement. They had to steal the work of researches solving these open problems and then rewrite their solution. The AI equivalent of fraud.
      • thinking_cactus 6d ago
        Meh. The car wash problem is an underspecified statement. It's like, hey, I just popped into existence and someone asked me if they should drive to the car wash nearby. It's not an insane assumption that the user isn't dumb and has some other reason to be asking the question other than it being a trick/stupid question (duh, if you want to wash your car you need to drive it to the car wash!). Taking it as some ultimate measure of intelligence simply doesn't make sense to me.
        • selcuka 6d ago
          It's not an ultimate measure of intelligence, but it's surely a measure of similarity to a real human being.
      • BobbyTables2 6d ago
        I’ve also been wondering how many common problems have been hardcoded in the latest AI models…
      • nearbuy 6d ago
        They did not hardcode that, because: a) There's zero evidence of them doing so b) Some models released before the car wash problem was discovered would consistently get it right c) Hardcoding it is pointless. No one is seriously asking that. It's just a trick question. Hardcoding one trick question won't fix its weakness at other simple trick questions. d) Since it went viral on the internet, the next time they updated the knowledge cutoff, the LLM would likely be aware of the trick. It will fix itself without the labs doing anything special, even assuming the new models weren't smart enough to naturally figure it out.
    • myaccountonhn 6d ago
      The critiques of AI laid out it Computer power and human reason are mostly still valid.