"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Seriously the sheer amount of people that equate coherent speech with sentience is mind boggling.
All jokes aside, I have heard some decently educated technical people say “yeah, it’s really creepy that it put a random laugh in what it said” or “it broke the 4th wall when talking”… it’s fucking programmed to do that and you just walked right in to it.
Technical term is the ELIZA effect.
In 1966, Professor Weizenbaum made a chatbot called ELIZA that essentially repeats what you say back in different terms.
He then noticed by accident that people keep convincing themselves it's fucking concious.
"I had not realized ... that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."
- Prof. Weizenbaum on ELIZA.
Of course it's creepy. Why wouldn't it be? Someone programmed it to do that, or programmed it in such a way that it weighted those additions. That's weird.
Same energy
Probably why it was posted.
Give this guy $100 billion!
I always wanted to teach a robot to say "I think therefore I am".
Ok this is crazy, I just saw this word earlier today in the book I was reading—I know it's primed in my brain now, but really, what are the odds of seeing this again?
Yeah? Well, maybe yours is an illusion, but how to you explain all the dodge rams on the road after I bought mine?
Love the meme but also hate the drivel that fills the comment sections on these types of things. People immediately start talking past each other. Half state unquantifiable assertions as fact ("...a computer doesn't, like, know what an apple is maaan...") and half pretend that making a sufficiently complex model of the human mind lets them ignore the Hard Problems of Consciousness ("...but, like, what if we just gave it a bigger context window...").
It's actually pretty fun to theorize if you ditch the tribalism. Stuff like the physical constraints of the human brain, what an "artificial mind" could be and what making one could mean practically/philosophically. There's a lot of interesting research and analysis out there and it can help any of us grapple with the human condition.
But alas, we can't have that. An LLM can be a semi-interesting toy to spark a discussion but everyone has some kind of Pavlovian reaction to the topic from the real world shit storm we live in.
(“…a computer doesn’t, like, know what an apple is maaan…”)
I think you're misunderstanding and/or deliberately misrepresenting the point. The point isn't some asinine assertion, it's a very real fundamental problem with using LLMs for any actually useful task.
If you ask a person what an apple is, they think back to their previous experiences. They know what an apple looks like, what it tastes like, what it can be used for, how it feels to hold it. They have a wide variety of experiences that form a complete understanding of what an apple is. If they have never heard of an apple, they'll tell you they've never heard of it.
If you ask an LLM what an apple is, they don't pull from any kind of database of information, they don't pull from experiences, they don't pull from any kind of logic. Rather, they generate an answer that sounds like what a person would say in response to the question, "What is an apple?" They generate this based on nothing more than language itself. To an LLM, the only difference between an apple and a strawberry and a banana and a gibbon is that these things tend to be mentioned in different types of sentences. It is, granted, unlikely to tell you that an apple is a type of ape, but if it did it would say it confidently and with absolutely no doubt in its mind, because it doesn't have a mind and doesn't have doubt and doesn't have an actual way to compare an apple and a gibbon that doesn't involve analyzing the sentences in which the words appear.
The problem is that most of the language-related tasks which would be useful to automate require not just text which sounds grammatically correct but text which makes sense. Text which is written with an understanding of the context and the meanings of the words being used.
An LLM is a very convincing Chinese room. And a Chinese room is not useful.
As an example of that, try asking a LLM questions about precise details about the lore of a fictional universe you know well, and you know that what you're asking about hasn't ever been detailed.
Not Tolkien because this has been too much discussed on the internet. Pick a universe much more niche.
It will completely invent stuff that kinda makes sense. Because it's predicting the next words that seem likely in the context.
A human would be much less likely to do this because they'd just be able to think and tell you "huh... I don't think the authors ever thought about that".
About the only useful task an LLM could have is generating random NPC dialog for a video game. Even then, it's close to the least efficient way to do it.
There's a lot of stuff it can do that's useful, just all malicious. Anything which requires confidently lying to someone about stuff where the fine details don't matter. So it's a perfect tool for scammers.
Is it possible that you try to convince yourself that you are not in any tribe just becouse you picked yours by being contraitan to two tribes that you haslty drew with crude labels?
WE picked our position match our convictions! THEY picked the convictions to match their position. And we know which is which becouse we know which one is ME.
Well there's two different layers of discussions that people mix together. One is the discussion in abstract about what it means to be human, the limits of our physical existence, the hubris of technological advancement, the feasibility of singularity, etc... I have opinions here for sure, but the whole topic is open ended and multipolar.
The other is the tangible: the datacenter building, oil burning, water wasting, slop creating, culture exploiting, propoganda manufacturing reality. Here there's barely any ethical wiggle room and you're either honest or deluding yourself. But the mere existence of generative Ai can still drive some interesting, if niche, debates (ownership of information, trust in authority and narrative, the cost of convenience...).
So there are different readings of the original meme depending on where you're coming from:
I don't think it's contrarian to like some of those readings/discussions but still be disappointed in the usual shouting matches.
I guess "what it means to be conscious" will always be a hot topic, but I'm there with you, it's fun to ponder.
Duude, maybe if we gave it a couple (million) qubits instead? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41416227/
It's interesting but that doesn't mean the online discussions are good, half the time it's some random person's bong hit shit post that you end up reading.
And even tech bros have terrible opinions. See: Peter Thiel.
The tech bros gas AI up for start ups and venture capitalist scams.
Even Dell doesn't believe in AI capabilities as they've noticed consumers are not gravitating to AI features in a saying the quiet part loudly quote (https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/dell-admits-customers-disgusted-pcs-ai)
You cannot get a good honest AI take because propagators simply blindly trust llm output as if it came from God and anti-AI people conveniently ignore useful results like medical screening for cancer (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jan/29/ai-use-in-breast-cancer-screening-cuts-rate-of-later-diagnosis-by-12-study-finds)
Me personally ? I don't want to hear anyone's AI take. I don't use AI but in a future when I would end up using it is when it actually codes properly or does anything I want it to properly. No half assed features.
AI right now for my use cases is completely worthless. Maybe in 50 years that won't be the case but I'm not very hopeful for its progress.
AI being conscious is all gas from tech bros.
There is a great short story called The Sleepover, which involves true artificial intelligence and what it did.
spoiler
IIRC: true artificial intelligence originated in a research lab, but being intelligent, avoided detection, spread to the entire Earth, eventually broke free of physical world, and was performing mathematical manipulations with reality itself.
You're committing a different sin, and it's failing to consider that I've already played with these toys 6 years ago and I'm now bored with them.
Also, you're on the fuckAI board, which is a place dedicated to a political position.
Agreed. He's committed the sin of not realizing he's in an echo chamber. How dare he try to have a rational conversation when people like petrol sniff king and I just want to cling to our tribalism! We're right and there's nothing you can to do convince us otherwise.
You are alive.
Just got shown that at a lecture yesterday... Hmm.
Mind blowing 🤯