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We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent

Technology
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  • Wikipedia is literally just a very long number, if you want to oversimplify things into absurdity. Modern LLMs are literally running on neural networks, just like you. Just less of them and with far less structure. It is also on average more intelligent than you on far more subjects, and can deduce better reasoning than flimsy numerology - not because you are dumb, but because it is far more streamlined. Another thing entirely is that it is cognizant or even dependable while doing so.

    Modern LLMs waste a lot more energy for a lot less simulated neurons. We had what you are describing decades ago. It is literally built on the works of our combined intelligence, so how could it also not be intelligent? Perhaps the problem is that you have a loaded definition of intelligence. And prompts literally work because of its deductive capabilities.

    Errors also build up in dementia and Alzheimers. We have people who cannot remember what they did yesterday, we have people with severed hemispheres, split brains, who say one thing and do something else depending on which part of the brain its relying for the same inputs. The difference is our brains have evolved through millennia through millions and millions of lifeforms in a matter of life and death, LLMs have just been a thing for a couple of years as a matter of convenience and buzzword venture capital. They barely have more neurons than flies, but are also more limited in regards to the input they have to process. The people running it as a service have a bested interest not to have it think for itself, but in what interests them. Like it or not, the human brain is also an evolutionary prediction device.

    People don't predict values to determine their answers to questions...

    Also, it's called neural network, not because it works exactly like neurons but because it's somewhat similar. They don't "run on neural networks", they're called like that because it's more than one regression model where information is being passed on from one to another, sort of like a chain of neurons, but not exactly. It's just a different name for a transformer model.

    I don't know enough to properly compare it to actual neurons, but at the very least, they seem to be significantly more deterministic and way way more complex.

    Literally, go to chatgpt and try to test its common reasoning. Then try to argue with it. Open a new chat and do the exact same questions and points. You'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

    Alzheimer's is an entirely different story, and no, it's not stochastic. Seizures are stochastic, at least they look like that, which they may actually not be.

  • have you seen the American Republican party recently? it brings a new perspective on how stupid humans can be.

    Lmao true

  • A gun isn't dangerous, if you handle it correctly.

    Same for an automobile, or aircraft.

    If we build powerful AIs and put them "in charge" of important things, without proper handling they can - and already have - started crashing into crowds of people, significantly injuring them - even killing some.

    Thanks for the downer.

  • You're a meat based copy machine with a built in justification box.

    Except of course that humans invented language in the first place. So uh, if all we can do is copy, where do you suppose language came from? Ancient aliens?

    No we invented "human" language. There are dozens of other animal out there that all have their own languages, completely independant of our.

    We simply refined base calls to be more and more specific. Differences evolved because people are bad at telephone and lots of people have to be special/different and use slight variations every generation.

  • Thanks for the downer.

    Anytime, and incase you missed it: I'm not just talking about AI driven vehicles. AI driven decisions can be just as harmful: https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-warning-for-europe-over-risks-of-using-algorithms/

  • People don't predict values to determine their answers to questions...

    Also, it's called neural network, not because it works exactly like neurons but because it's somewhat similar. They don't "run on neural networks", they're called like that because it's more than one regression model where information is being passed on from one to another, sort of like a chain of neurons, but not exactly. It's just a different name for a transformer model.

    I don't know enough to properly compare it to actual neurons, but at the very least, they seem to be significantly more deterministic and way way more complex.

    Literally, go to chatgpt and try to test its common reasoning. Then try to argue with it. Open a new chat and do the exact same questions and points. You'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

    Alzheimer's is an entirely different story, and no, it's not stochastic. Seizures are stochastic, at least they look like that, which they may actually not be.

    Literally, go to a house fly and try to test its common reasoning. Then try to argue with it. Find a new house fly and do the exact same questions and points. You'll see what I'm talking about.

    There's no way to argue in such nebulous terms when every minute difference is made into an unsurpassable obstacle. You are not going to convince me, and you are not open to being convinced. We'll just end up with absurd discussions, like talking about how and whether stochastic applies to Alzherimer's.

  • No we invented "human" language. There are dozens of other animal out there that all have their own languages, completely independant of our.

    We simply refined base calls to be more and more specific. Differences evolved because people are bad at telephone and lots of people have to be special/different and use slight variations every generation.

    Are you saying human languages are a derivative of bird language or something? If so, I'd like to see the proof of that.

  • Are you saying human languages are a derivative of bird language or something? If so, I'd like to see the proof of that.

    Do you really think birds are the only animals that make calls.

  • Do you really think birds are the only animals that make calls.

    What does any of this have to do with anything anyway?

    Humans invented the first human language. People have ideas that aren't simple derivatives of other ideas.

  • We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

    But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

    This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

    So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

    Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

    Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

    @technocrit While I agree with the main point that "AI/LLMs has/have no agency", I must be the boring, ackchyually person who points out and remembers some nerdy things.

    tl;dr: indeed, AIs and LLMs aren't intelligent... we aren't so intelligent as we think we are, either, because we hold no "exclusivity" of intelligence among biosphere (corvids, dolphins, etc) and because there's no such thing as non-deterministic "intelligence". We're just biologically compelled to think that we can think and we're the only ones to think, and this is just anthropocentric and naive from us (yeah, me included).

    If you have the patience to read a long and quite verbose text, it's below. If you don't, well, no problems, just stick to my tl;dr above.

    -----

    First and foremost, everything is ruled by physics. Deep down, everything is just energy and matter (the former of which, to quote the famous Einstein equation e = mc, is energy as well), and this inexorably includes living beings.

    Bodies, flesh, brains, nerves and other biological parts, they're not so different from a computer case, CPUs/NPUs/TPUs, cables and other computer parts: to quote Sagan, it's all "made of star stuff", it's all a bunch of quarks and other elementary particles clumped together and forming subatomic particles forming atoms forming molecules forming everything we know, including our very selves...

    Everything is compelled to follow the same laws of physics, everything is subjected to the same cosmic principles, everything is subjected to the same fundamental forces, everything is subjected to the same entropy, everything decays and ends (and this comment is just a reminder, a cosmic-wide Memento mori).

    It's bleak, but this is the cosmic reality: cosmos is simply indifferent to all existence, and we're essentially no different than our fancy "tools", be it the wheel, the hammer, the steam engine, the Voyager twins or the modern dystopian electronic devices crafted to follow pieces of logical instructions, some of which were labelled by developers as "Markov Chains" and "Artificial Neural Networks".

    Then, there's also the human non-exclusivity among the biosphere: corvids (especially Corvus moneduloides, the New Caleidonian crow) are scientifically known for their intelligence, so are dolphins, chimpanzees and many other eukaryotas. Humans love to think we're exclusive in that regard, but we're not, we're just fooling ourselves!

    IMHO, every time we try to argue "there's no intelligence beyond humans", it's highly anthropocentric and quite biased/bigoted against the countless other species that currently exist on Earth (and possibly beyond this Pale Blue Dot as well). We humans often forgot how we are species ourselves (taxonomically classified as "Homo sapiens"). We tend to carry on our biological existences as if we were some kind of "deities" or "extraterrestrials" among a "primitive, wild life".

    Furthermore, I can point out the myriad of philosophical points, such as the philosophical point raised by the mere mention of "senses" ("Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, ..."😞 "my senses deceive me" is the starting point for Cartesian (René Descartes) doubt. While Descarte's conclusion, "Cogito ergo sum", is highly anthropocentric, it's often ignored or forgotten by those who hold anthropocentric views on intelligence, as people often ground the seemingly "exclusive" nature of human intelligence on the ability to "feel".

    Many other philosophical musings deserve to be mentioned as well: lack of free will (stemming from the very fact that we were unable to choose our own births), the nature of "evil" (both the Hobbesian line regarding "human evilness" and the Epicurean paradox regarding "metaphysical evilness"), the social compliance (I must point out to documentaries from Derren Brown on this subject), the inevitability of Death, among other deep topics.

    All deep principles and ideas converging, IMHO, into the same bleak reality, one where we (supposedly "soul-bearing beings") are no different from a "souless" machine, because we're both part of an emergent phenomena (Ordo ab chao, the (apparent) order out of chaos) that has been taking place for Æons (billions of years and beyond, since the dawn of time itself).

    Yeah, I know how unpopular this worldview can be and how downvoted this comment will probably get. Still I don't care: someone who gazed into the abyss must remember how the abyss always gazes us, even those of us who didn't dare to gaze into the abyss yet.

    I'm someone compelled by my very neurodivergent nature to remember how we humans are just another fleeting arrangement of interconnected subsystems known as "biological organism", one of which "managed" to throw stuff beyond the atmosphere (spacecrafts) while still unable to understand ourselves. We're biologically programmed, just like the other living beings, to "fear Death", even though our very cells are programmed to terminate on a regular basis (apoptosis) and we're are subjected to the inexorable chronological falling towards "cosmic chaos" (entropy, as defined, "as time passes, the degree of disorder increases irreversibly").

  • Apparently Debian has alienated the developers

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    Oh man, I'm a bit late to the party here. He really believes the far-right Trump propaganda, and doesn't understand what diversity programs do. It's not a war between white men an all the other groups of people... It's just that is has proven to be difficult to for example write a menstrual tracker with a 99.9% male developer base. It's just super difficult to them to judge how that's going to be used in real-world scenarios and what some specific challenges and nice features are. That's why you listen to minority opinions, to deliver a product that caters to all people. And these minority opinions are notoriously difficult to attract. That's why we do programs for that. They are task-forces to address things aside from what's mainstream and popular. It'll also benefit straight white men. Liteally everyone because it makes Linux into a product that does more than just whatever is popular as of today. Same thing applies to putting effort into screen readers and disabled people and whatever other minorities need. If he just wants what is majority, I'd recommend installing Windows to him. Because that's where we're headed with this. That's the popular choice, at least on the desktop. That's what you're supposed to use if you dislike niche. Also his hubris... Says Debian should be free from politics. And the very next sentence he talks his politics and wants to shove his Trump anti-DEI politics into Debian.... Yeah, sure dude.
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    They're coming for our VPNs soon enough, be sure of that. Here in Australia they've already flagged wanting to ban them.
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    vanth@reddthat.comV
    I only vacation in countries that have trained their LLMs to use line breaks.
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    Same, especially when searching technical or niche topics. Since there aren't a ton of results specific to the topic, mostly semi-related results will appear in the first page or two of a regular (non-Gemini) Google search, just due to the higher popularity of those webpages compared to the relevant webpages. Even the relevant webpages will have lots of non-relevant or semi-relevant information surrounding the answer I'm looking for. I don't know enough about it to be sure, but Gemini is probably just scraping a handful of websites on the first page, and since most of those are only semi-related, the resulting summary is a classic example of garbage in, garbage out. I also think there's probably something in the code that looks for information that is shared across multiple sources and prioritizing that over something that's only on one particular page (possibly the sole result with the information you need). Then, it phrases the summary as a direct answer to your query, misrepresenting the actual information on the pages they scraped. At least Gemini gives sources, I guess. The thing that gets on my nerves the most is how often I see people quote the summary as proof of something without checking the sources. It was bad before the rollout of Gemini, but at least back then Google was mostly scraping text and presenting it with little modification, along with a direct link to the webpage. Now, it's an LLM generating text phrased as a direct answer to a question (that was also AI-generated from your search query) using AI-summarized data points scraped from multiple webpages. It's obfuscating the source material further, but I also can't help but feel like it exposes a little of the behind-the-scenes fuckery Google has been doing for years before Gemini. How it bastardizes your query by interpreting it into a question, and then prioritizes homogeneous results that agree on the "answer" to your "question". For years they've been doing this to a certain extent, they just didn't share how they interpreted your query.
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    "mistakes"
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    If you are taking business advice from ChatGPT that includes purchasing a ChatGPT subscription or can’t be bothered to look up how it works beforehand then your business is probably going to fail.
  • The largest cryptocurrency money-laundering ring

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    ulrich@feddit.orgU
    It has their name and where it came from so. Yes? That's not what I asked. Are you expecting people to direct link everything even when it is already atributed? I mean is that really too much to expect of people? To simply copy the link where they found the information and post it along with where they shared it?
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    fisch@discuss.tchncs.deF
    If I went to the USA now, they'd probably put me there after looking at my social media activity anyway