this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
88 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37719 readers
169 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I literally quoted the word for that exact reason. It just gets really tiring when you talk about AIs and someone always has to make this point. We all know they don't think or understand in the same way we do. No one gains anything by it being pointed out constantly.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

You said "they literally do analyze text" when that is not, literally, what they do.

And no, we don't "all know" that. Lay persons have no way of knowing whether AI products currently in use have any capacity for genuine understanding and reasoning, other than the fact that the promotional material uses words like "understanding", "reasoning", "thought process", and people talking about it use the same words. The language we choose to use is important!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The human capacity for reason is greatly overrated. The overwhelming majority of conversation is regurgitated thought, which is exactly what LLMs are designed to do.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

I don't really dispute that but at least we are able to apply formal analytical methods with repeatable outcomes. LLMs might (and do) achieve a similar result but they do so without any formal approach that can be reviewed, which has its drawbacks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

No it's not. It's pedantic and arguing semantics. It is essentially useless and a waste of everyone's time.

It applies a statistical model and returns an analysis.

I've never heard anyone argue when you say they used a computer to analyse it.

It's just the same AI bad bullshit and it's tiring in every single thread about them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

LLMs arent "bad" (ignoring, of course, the massive content theft necessary to train them), but they are being wildly misused.

"Analysis" is precisely one of those misuses. Grand Theft Autocomplete can't even count, ask it how many 'e's are in "elephant" and you'll get an answer anywhere from 1 to 3.

This is because they do not read or understand, they produce strings of tokens based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next. If prompted for an analysis they'll output something that looks like an analysis, but to determine whether it is accurate or not a human has to do the work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

LLMs cannot:

  • Tell fact from fiction
  • Accurately recall data from its training set
  • Count

LLMs can

  • Translate
  • Get the general vibe of a text (sentiment analysis)
  • Generate plausible text

Semantics aside, they're very different skills that require different setups to accomplish. Just because counting is an easier task than analysing text for humans, doesn't mean it's the same it's the same for a LLM. You can't use that as evidence for its inability to do the "harder" tasks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

You forgot to put caveats on all the things you claim LLMs can do, but only one of them doesn't need them.

Why would you think that LLMs can do sentiment analysis when they have no concept of context or euphemism and are wholly incapable of distinguishing sarcasm from genuine sentiment?

Why would you think that their translations are of any use given the above?

https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/mother-of-teen-who-died-by-suicide-sues-ai-startup/90994040

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

I never made any "AI bad" arguments (in fact, I said that they may be incredibly well suited to this) I just argued for the correct use of words and you hallucinated.