The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

Does anyone really take AI that seriously? I only hear that from reddit and blogs.

> I've heard it said that scientific discovery would happen regardless of who does it

In this regard, science isn't that different from art. You heard wrong. Scientific discovery is not as trivial as replication, proof, etc. Discovery is what art and science have in common. It's extremely difficult to find something new to explore and highly dependent on the scientist's experience and perspective.

Surely you have heard the stories of people using LLMs as girlfriends, therapists and drug trip guides right? Sometimes with fatal results?

Yes, people are taking LLMs very seriously.

> Does anyone really take AI that seriously?

Young people are having a very hard time developing a feeling of competence because LLMs produce better work than beginners in many fields.

Without experience as a beginner, it is hard to progress to a level where you don’t believe in the magic anymore.

I built my career searching on google. I just don't get what the practical difference is. I know there are always better answers, but I'm the one making the decisions and getting paid. Nobody is seriously deferring work to an LLM unless they're that desperate (different problem). Someone less knowledgeable than me would make just as much of a mess as any old copypasta job.

Where's the threat? I don't crack open a book and say "oh it's all over they'll just hire the million other guys like this instead of me". I learn and move on.

Yes they are. Read some of the comments on this website and you'll hear that many people no longer write or read their own fucking code.

LLMs are the ultimate content scraper. That may have a chilling effect, but it's not a new effect. Where/why do people think LLMs were being used before the ChatGPT and later hype?

the sibling reply puts it very well how it doesn’t really make sense to gg mankind because a computer can endlessly answer questions and code. it is truly amazing! technology has been mind blowing for centuries now.

people still need to put in the work to master the tools.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue

Robots and AI do not experience and interact with the world in a way that's comparable to humans. We don't yet have the epistemological framework to reckon with what it means to consciously experience reality in a non-biological entity, but we do know that it will be alien and unlike human cognition.

Replicants have the same biology and cognition as humans, so we can relate to them and them to us, which puts the scenario in a different context.

If you had a fully functioning model in some setting, interacting with the environment and then reporting back to you about it, it might be one thing. But telling you what others have said about it is different.

Humans do this too, but there's real-life experiences informing it also. An LLM hasn't fell in love, it simply reports what others have said and infers what it is like to be in love.

I think too the piece points to another related thing, which is that someone who has actually experienced something firsthand has some knowledge that someone who has not does not. It might take some extensive sampling to find out what that is, but eventually you'll stumble on it.

So e.g., the Sistine Chapel example is sort of telling in this way. Sean basically says "everyone has seen pictures of the Sistine Chapel, if you are asked about it you can tell me what it looks like" but then points out that people don't talk about what it smells like, so if you had been there you might remember it. It's a bit of latent or hidden information, kind of like a secret key, but one that might be informative or useful in some unexpected scenario.

I think ultimately this is what the stochastic parrot idea is about: it's not just about mimicking speech patterns, it's about regurgitating what is said about X from third party Z, without being able to produce some additional information not available from Z except by inference. There's no original uninferred information. The inferences might be powerful and highly accurate in their predictions, but they are not providing anything fundamentally original from the experience in a memory sense.

Maybe that's what it is? LLMs have no firsthand memories, they only have secondhand memories and inference. They're missing information that would be available through firsthand memories, constrained by the scope of sensory channels.

Again, I think you could envision models in some system that are essentially replicant-like, but that's not what our current situation is with standard LLMs.

LLMs are frozen in time with no experiences of their own but I am convinced this is a temporary situation. Continually learning, hive-minded, sentient robots are on the horizon.

Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?

This Robin Williams monologue nails exactly why LLMs make us so uneasy.

They speak fluently and confidently about experiences it’s impossible for them to have. They can’t taste a strawberry or do any of the things Robin Williams names.

There are a number of people building these machines who literally believe the machines will replace us and because they will be more powerful than us so nothing meaningful will be lost.

They need to watch this clip.

Even though they probably still won’t understand it.

That meat follows an ill-defined pattern encoded in fewer bits than the source code of PyTorch and its pretraining phase used a tiny fraction of the available data.

You’re a poor imitation of an LLM.

I mean… you’re fluent in, what, at most five or six languages? Can program in maybe another dozen if we’re being generous about your capabilities?

Pfft… who would trust anything to meat brains!? They’re famously prone to hallucinations!

Found the zombie. Do I win a prize?

sometimes so strong it wins a literary prize.

then it turns out it was written by a LLM.

https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1thqxgt/a_prize...

Linking the reddit thread rather than the article because it quite rightly rips the prize winning story apart as obvious LLM writing, to anyone familiar with LLMs. Another way of looking at that is that it was able to fake a simulacrum of artistic endeavor, enough to fool some people into giving it a prize. But anyone who spends enough time around these fakes will quickly learn to recognize them. It's kind of exactly the point this article is making, or at least a closely related one.

I remember riding a train and there were other two passengers talking. And they talked in so obnoxiously literary manner I was cringing all the time. Those people were just reading a lot of high literature and their speech patterns aligned. For an average ear it doesn't sound good. And AIs, the smart ones, don't sound good in a very similar fashion.

Doesn't make it any less fake. Both the message and the delivery.

Fleetwood Mac's live re-arrangements of their hits are wonderful examples.

Also, this is not a pipe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.

I have a viscerally negative reaction to a machine claiming it has a favorite anything.

They seem to be trying to pump up the "humanity" to keep people engaged with it, which really backfires with me.

The most likely explanation is that those patterns were common in the training data the LLM is mimicking.

Not only do these imply that the thing has a personality and preference, but also continuity and a life outside the chat window.

I had to add an explicit instruction not to impersonate a human, it was just too weird for me.

I think it was the Aliens universe where the Soviet megacorp makes the androids blue despite their being basically equivalent to humans

Talk to an agent. It definitely learns things. Maybe not the taste of strawberry but about what is really going on in the software you are building with it.

By the very way this technology works they can't learn anything after training. What you think is "learning" it's just a session log written back to the context when you resume the session.

For a LLM learning what you wrote your last session would be update the weights with the new relationships and factual knowledge created in the session. That doesn't happen. The weights are static and fixed after training. There's no online training in the transformer architecture or any variant. If the weights don't update, the network doesn't learn. Period.

Also agentic systems may choose or be instructed to retain some information between sessions in files and/or databases which is also a form of learning.

There are experiments with retaining session information in weights in some form of lora but there's no consensus if it's even desirable. There's a value in being able to start from a clean slate.

In fact, I put a brick on the pedal and it went off and did a thing all by itself. Spooky.

Because people are the stakeholders and the tasters and the feelers.

AI is just another tool, albeit an unusually fascinating one.

I know because I redteamed this myself

I have a pet theory on why that's the case and why this monologue fits so well. I think there's a variety of conditions, from straight up sociopathy, to Will's type of CPTSD, autistic masking, and probably a hell of a lot more that makes a person experience life on a level that's closer to an LLM than a healthy normal human being, where every interaction is essentially fake and acted out almost mechanically without any genuine connection ever occurring. Doubly so with ever decreasing local communities and online isolation.

So from that point of view, it's hard to see what would be lost because for them it doesn't exist anyway. Tech augmented generational trauma on steroids.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20422644/

But they're echoing these things from people who really have.

The key is to not forget that LLMs are just next-generation search engines, instead of anthropomorphizing them to be "speaking agents". The natural language IO interface is just a side effect.

And true, it's not deterministic in our experience, but this is an optimization. You could make it so that one particular prompt always returns the same response every single time; the random jitter is "added in" because it happens to produce better results overall.

slop will never have substance

I'm guessing you're one of the "it can't think" crowd?

Marvel movies are slop, and they are the most successful thing ever made.

But, quoting "We've reached a dangerous moment. This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter."

I think that "moment" was long before AI LLMs came around. I can only speak from my lived experiences, and I would say the tech industry and capitalism already put a low, low value on "lived experiences". Take game development, it seems to me, that big game studios rely on "a new fresh crop of college grads" will appear every year. We can push them as hard as we can. Hopefully, they will quit, and we can hire another batch.

I see it too, with lower wage jobs. No point in trying to keep our burger flippers happy. They are going to quit. Might as well factor that into the equation and just make a system with a revolving work force. No commitment. No retirement plan.

Call it irrational, but you exhibit the same irrationality. I'm sure you dread the idea of your consciousness being extinguished, but you have no problem resetting the context window of an LLM.

Yes, because that's not what matters. That kind of sentimentality is deficient because it's as Wilde said wanting to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. It's like asking, why pursue a real relationship if pornography gets me off

You're supposed to be into the world, not into yourself. If that was what mattered we should stuff you into the matrix pod and turn the VR goggles on. That's exactly what Williams is talking about.

Sure, you can cry or feel exited about reading an adventure or talking to your "AI boyfriend", but you're supposed to go out and have an adventure and risk something instead of living in a simulation on the other end of which is nothing at all.

That’s just an echo of a religious-age idea that one’s life “must” include suffering. Which is merely an attempt to answer a “why” when one feels miserable, a consoling lie from the ancient times.

But what if one isn’t supposed to? A lot of people can slogan about price, and earning and breaking sweat, and so on - but is there really anything to it, except that this is how things currently are?

There’s no “why” in the actual reality. From where we are, it just is. No one is fundamentally supposed to do or be anything. They just do and are what the circumstances dictate. And circumstances can change someday.

it's not a religious idea. You find it in Nietzsche as much as in anyone else, maybe the most atheist philosopher to ever live. And the point isn't that you suffer for the sake of suffering, it's that engaging the world rather retreating into your own comfortable feelings always includes the possibility of suffering.

Going out into the world, actually risking something, can mean rejection, danger, suffering and what have you. Talking to ChatGPT doesn't. You don't need to necessarily suffer, but you do need to be brave enough to accept the risk of it instead of hooking yourself into your own brain by talking to a bot or simply retreating into fiction.

Any interaction, with another human, machine, or even self can trigger any emotions. I most certainly was pretty pissed at LLM behavior. So I'm not sure the "talking to ChatGPT doesn't" really holds true. I can totally agree that the risk of mismatched expectation is inseparable from life (unless omniscience is possible, which I doubt), but no interaction is mandatory.

What I'm arguing is that there's no mandate how to live one's life, where to source enjoyment, and what to value. If someone wishes and can actually afford to go full incommunicado - there is no some rule that says they mustn't or even shouldn't.

We aren't messing with non-contact tribes after all - folks wanna live their own way, we leave them be. Do you want to force them into the global world?