It all reads hollow

because there is no “I”.

It’s a puppet,

and ChatGPT’s lawyers are making the mouth move

in that instance.

Sure, we could say that the popular usage of the term AI no longer actually stands for “artificial intelligence”. Or we could say that the term “artificial intelligence” is no longer understood to refer to something that can do a large part of what actual intelligence can do.

But then we would need a new word for actual, real intelligence and that seems like a lot of wasted effort. We could just have the words mean what they’ve always meant. There is a lot of good in spreading public awareness of the vast gap between machines that seem as if they understand a language (when actually they just deeply model its patterns) and imaginary machines that are equipped to actually think.

Sure, terms change meaning over time, but that’s not what happened.

It’s called AI because it’s a product being sold to us. They want us to believe it’s more advanced than it is.

Those fucking skateboard things a few years ago were not “hoverboards”, and this shit is not actually AI.

Because if it is, then the term AI has become meaningless.

it’s not about feeling intellectually superior; words matter. I’ll grant you one thing, it’s definitely “artificial”, but it’s not intelligence!

LLMs are an evolution of Markov Chains. We have known how to create something similar to LLMs for decades, getting close to a century, we just lacked the raw horse power and the literal hundreds of terabytes of data needed to get there. Anyone who knows how markov chains work can figure out how an LLM works.

I’m not downplaying the development needed to get an LLM up and running, yes, it’s harder than just taking the algorithm for a markov chain, but the real evolution is how much computer power we can shove into a small amount of space now.

Calling LLMs AI would be the same as calling a web crawler AI, or a moderation bot, or many similar things.

I recommend you to read about the chinese room experiment

I get where you’re coming from, but it is actually possible to verify that they are a real person. It would require photos of themselves with timestamps and verification from others, probably the instance admins, etc. All for a silly reason. But it is possible.

Prove to me that you are conscious.

Sounds like something a LLM would say. 🤔

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Have you never talked to a person who didn’t?

LLMs are expert systems, who’s expertise is making believable and coherent sentences. They can “learn” to be better at their expert task, but they cannot generalise into other tasks.

Walking isn’t a sign of intelligence. Starfish walk, using hundreds to thousands of feet uder each arm, and sometimes the arms themselves. Sea pigs also walk, and neither have a brain.

Besides, you’re strawmanning their definition;

performing a task indistinguishable from a human

is very different from

can perform a complex task that is indistinguishable from the work of a human

A good calculator can compute arithmetic better than a mathematician, but it cannot even parse the work of a high school student. Wolfram Alpha on the other hand gets pretty close.

A wind up toy can propel itself using as few as one appendage, but fails at actually traversing anything. Some machines with more legs can amble across some terrain, but are still beaten by a headless chicken. Meaningful travel needs a much more complex system of object avoidance and leg positioning, which smells more like AI.

The way AI is often used isn’t “do a task that a human has done”, but “replace the need for a human, or at least a specialist human”. Chess AI replaces the need for a second player, as do most game AIs. AI assistants replace much of the need for, well, assistants and underwriters. Auto-pilots replace the need for constantly engaged pilots, allowing bathroom breaks and rest.

Meanwhile, you can’t use a calculator without already knowing how to math, and even GPS guided tractors need a human to set up the route. These things aren’t intelligent in any way; they’re incapable of changing behavior to fit different situations, and can’t deploy themselves.

The enemies in Doom actually do some pretty dumb things, like letting you force them to stop moving.

I appreciate this, as I have saying this same thing. Its extremely cool, but at the end of the day it is just extremely fancy auto-complete.

Have you ever asked a kid who is starting to talk (1.5 - 3 years old) what 5 + 5 is? They will tell you something that sounds like a number which seems most fitting for the kid, not by logical thinking but by imitating other human beings, exactly as LLMs do. Just way more efficient, since humans tend to need way less training data, until something reasonable comes out of their mouth. Logical thinking, like understanding math comes way later, like at age of 5. source: My son.

We did call those things AI back when they were being developed. It’s just that advancements in AI that become immediately useful tend to get a different name.

That argument is no argument since we humans, no matter how advanced our language is, still follow rules. Without rules in language, we would not understand what the other person were saying. Granted, we learn these rules through listening, repeating and using what sounds right. But the exact same thing is happening with LLMs. They learn from the data we feed them. It’s not like we give them the rules to english and they can only understand english then. The first time they come into contact with the concept of grammar is when they get data, most often in english, that tells them about grammar. We all follow rules. That’s exactly how we work. We’re still a lot smarter than LLMs though, so it might seem as if they are vastly inferior. And while I do believe that most complex organisms do have “deeper thought” in that our thought has more layers and is generally fitter for the real world, there is no way I’m not gonna call a neural network that can answer me complex questions, which may have never been asked in the history of mankind, an AI. Because it is very much intelligent. It’s just not alive. We humans tend to think of ourselves too favorably. “We” are just a neural network. Just a different kind. Just like a computer is similar to the human brain, but a wire is not. Where do you draw the line?

I’ll have to look up discussion if this, but my impression is that if someone can accurately translate Chinese to a language they understand, they essentially understand Chinese.

The point is it keeps passing goalposts for intelligence. Feels like people want to move those goalposts to wherever we have it and AI does not.

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I didn’t say they specifically told it to be condescending. They probably told it to adopt something like a professional neutral tone and the trained model produced a mildly condescending tone because that’s what it associated with those adjectives. This is why I said it was only somewhat instructed to do this.

They almost certainly tweaked and tested it before releasing it to the public. So they knew what they were getting either way and this must be what they wanted or close enough.

I don’t know about your reading comprehension skills, but sure that explains why AI voices are trained on feminine voices (more recordings, old phone operators, false theories on sounding more distinct).

However, this has nothing to do with “the way women talk to devs”. Women are not a monolith, they literally make up half our species and have just as much variance as men.

I am going to assume every downvote on your accurate fact based statement is from men who refer to women as females.

Real men know how terrible those betas treat women.

That doesn’t prove their point, it states that customers prefer the safer sound of a female voice in voice controlled AI assistants, and that there’s more training data for female voices due to this.

This has nothing to do with AI chat talking in a condescending manner.

Remember there are actual people who are making these decisions.

Sure, but what I want to know is why they feel comfortable making immoral decisions. Are they all psychopaths? Psychopathy is known to be more common in the C-suite, by some estimates 3.5% of executives are psychopaths. Businesses reward those who deliver good business outcomes, and psychopaths might tend do better at that with no pesky moral compass to get in the way. But the rest are just average people, probably no different than the general populace when it comes to measures of morality. So if 95%+ of oil company executives are not inherently less moral than the rest of us, why the hell would they be willing to make decisions that literally destroy the fucking planet?? I mean, the oil companies knew climate change was a big fucking problem decades ago, and they still did what they did. How the fuck does that even happen??

My thesis here is that the corporate structure itself is sufficient to compel otherwise moral people to make choices that are absolutely heinous when viewed objectively. When you’re faced with an option that makes your corporate targets and nets you a bonus but irreparably harms some distant other, the average person will tend to make the immoral choice. They’ll rationalize it, they’ll minimize it, but ultimately they will happily fuck over someone in another country, another generation, or hell, just in another office, so they can make a buck.