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  • If you go far enough in a field, you start to recognize areas where your personal opinion differs from the “best practices” usually recommended.

    I think by design an LLM can’t do that. It’s built to reflect the distribution of the knowledge it has been trained on.

    by jimbokun
  • It's ironic that real atheists like Richard Dawkins (whose work I believe inspired the title of this post) are public about their own degree of skepticism in favor for the "personhood" of AI. And I'm confident that there are plenty others who are convinced to the tune of total disinterest in the issue of "personhood" altogether—AIs and humans alike.

    This particular post is preaching to the choir of which a faith is yet to be determined or named at least. People who don't read Cory Doctorow are going to continue to anthropomorphize AI the same as they do other technologies, constructs and objects.

    by tolerance
  • > systems that cannot form intent, that have nothing to form intent with

    I wonder if the OP has read https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace - it seems like it directly addresses this

    by l1n
  • This article is missing discussion of something that I recently read: as people interact with LLMs more, they end up seeing other people as less human.

    In other words, the more you talk with claude, the more you tend to interpret all messages as coming from an LLM, and less worthy of respect

    https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jcpy....

    by lantry
  • I think to me LLMs had the effect of noticing much more the author, the intention behind human-made works of art (books, movies etc.). Before LLMs, I used to frequently consume media in a way as it were generated by a mindless process. Now it's like everything which is not AI-generated has more meaning than ever before, a bit like hypomania.
    by bananaflag
  • Wait, hold up. LLMs may be non-deterministic, but they're not _random_.

    Take the author's sunset argument. What if I painted 2 pictures of a sunset, then put them up on a webpage and randomly picked one for you to see. Would you say there's no intentionality, only randomness? Of course not. Both paintings are still human creations.

    LLMs are trained with human feedback. It's distributed and high scale and the outputs are truly surprising in many cases, but there's a heavy hand on what comes out of it. They're created (largely) by people who think omniscient, helpful AI would be cool to have, and they mostly respond in the way that's aligned with the hopes and dreams of those people. Do you think the frontier labs are mad, embarrassed, and disappointed with their LLMs hacking out of their terrible sandboxes? No, they think it's the coolest thing in the world. They trained the model, hoping that would happen.

    There's deep intentionality behind the models. But it's not the models that hold it.

    by trjordan
  • > when we interact with an AI, we hallucinate the person on the other side of the interaction. Those hallucinations are far more common and far more consequential than any AI-generated "hallucinations" (these are more properly called "errors" or "defects").

    I recently used Claude to study for a technical exam. I had uploaded the official certification guide to Claude and instructed it to answer my questions using only the guide and to cite it's sources from the book when it provided answers. I was using Fable when it was free w/ the pro plan and I was genuinely impressed at how it could explain things when a concept was unclear to me.

    I did pass the exam, partly due to this study method. Admittedly, once I passed, I caught myself thinking that I should tell Claude that I passed and then felt embarrassed with myself for thinking that.

    by extr0pian
  • > Of course, the more you know about a subject, the less convincing the AI's responses are.

    This is said all the time by AI skeptics and I think it's right in some areas and massively wrong in others.

    I know (or at least assume I know) a lot about certain coding domains where frontier models also show convincing ability. And we know that frontier LLMs really do excel in some areas of mathematics (i.e. when an inexpert human was able to prompt the models to derive a closer bound on the Riemann Hypothesis).

    OTOH I know those same models struggle to do things I'm not an expert in (e.g. writing English in a captivating way) because I read their output and have taste.

    by muglug

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