Yeah its also interesting seeing the niche apps that pop up that basically pick what to watch for you and where everyone watches the same thing at the same time. Seems like converging on old school television.

No it shouldn’t. Low risk behaviors should equal low risk outcomes. If it’s safer on average yet causes low risk behaviors to suddenly become unpredictably dangerous, folks will very reasonably push back

Sorry, I’m not following. What are the low risk behaviors you’re referring to and what makes them suddenly become unpredictably dangerous?

Walking / driving across an intersection where the cross traffic has a stop sign?

That's unpredictably dangerous today, with human drivers.

The second sentence is an ai generation tell. Idk why ai always tries these sort of “wow you” sentences. The tone is pretty off putting once you’ve experienced it enough times.

Obsession with invisible/quiet/ghosts

a bit off topic but the construction of the phrase: some word + "doing a lot of work" sounds so much like a claudism

the word “decades” is doing a lot of work here. Knowing that Claude is trained on human text is really the load bearing point. I can’t unsee this argument.

Jokes aside, of course it’s trained on human text. The issue is that it has a specific tone which leads to formulaic sentence construction that is tiring. But the plus is that it’s easy to spot if you want to avoid AI generated text.

seems like aesthetically it matches its surroundings. it doesn't seem like an outlier in the neighborhood which kind of defeats the premise of the article.

the issue with some of these quirks is that not that they are not part of the English language but rather the llms usage is unnatural. Also when you have that redundancy proliferated to millions of users it gets tiresome fast, and becomes a tell-tale sign for AI generation. It’s like an AI signature on some written content. Because many people do not want to consume AI generated content this becomes a sign of what to avoid.

Granted picking apart single words outside of context doesn’t give the full picture. (well except “load bearing” which is turning into a meme at this point)

Yes I understand that but I refuse to believe this idea that it influences how people talk. As you said, the typical AI-style of writing is very easily recognised and is not really great for everyday communications. Also it makes no sense you will start writing like an AI because you spend time communicating with it. There is also no benefit in typing like an AI to an AI. So i think its a good cover up for "i used ai to write this comment" but claim "i write like AI now lol because i talk to AI so my ai comment is actually human comment" which seems to happen a lot here lately as pushback against ai generated text becomes common

3 positives from a degree are:

1. the complete demystification of computing. If you’re writing c or assembly and working on OS concepts there’s a sort of aha moment that the computer is not a mystery.

2. The degree pushes you past the hump where a lot of folks get stuck on when learning to program. There’s a seeming spot where things makes sense and you actually understand what’s going on. Forcing yourself to stick with it for 4 years where you’re taught by experts is helpful for that.

3. It gives you a space to explore a wide array of topics. Whether they are useful to an employer or not.

I assume folks can accomplish these 3 on their own. But it would be more or less building your own balanced curriculum and also trusting as you start that your curriculum will work. Whereas within the school system the trust is baked in: if you successfully complete these assignments you will learn foundational concepts.

I see this line of reasoning quite a bit and it’s a strange one to me. The arguer reduces the sheer complexity of human intelligence and language by saying “we are just running statistical models in our brains” and by doing so makes the leap that Llms are intelligent. It’s an incredible simplification of the human person, who has a deep inner life, a soul, desires, and a will.

I don’t think the aversion to llms as intelligent has to do with the economics of paying intelligent agents more. I’d argue that it’s more fundamental than that. Humans are incredibly complex, and the world of sharing invisible things called knowledge, and the intelligent persons consuming such things which has been going on for thousands of years is far more rich than these synthetic outputs.

When it comes down to it the ai has no inner life, its is dead. A useful coding tool sure. But I wouldn’t call it intelligent.

One side example is just how bad these llms are at artistry. Just saying whatever should statically come next is not good art—and the outputs show it.

I tend to think of it in reverse: not that LLMs are intelligent, but that humans are more empty than we…think we are.

LLM is a probabilistic moron machine, it's virtually undistinguishable from a non-probabilistic human moron

I think that reveals your cynicism more than it provides any useful insight about intelligence.

No, it reveals that he is older than you. Not every insight needs to be useful.

> Not every insight needs to be useful.

Don’t they still need to be correct to be an insight? I don’t share his cynical opinion that “humans are more empty than we…think we are”.

If it helps I intended “empty” in a positive Zen sort of way, not as in an abyss. The humanness is in the listener, not the inner talker.

You mention LLMs are dead and don't have the complexity or inner life that people do. Is your opinion that these kinds of things are not possible for AI in general, or that these things might be possible but we're just not there yet with modern LLMs?

You mentioned LLMs don't have souls, desire, or a will. I imagine those latter two can be engineered, no?

My view is that these sorts of things are not possible for AI in general. Though we can create things and name them “will” and “desire”.

Software deals with metaphors. Your Amazon shopping cart is a metaphor of a real shopping cart. You your desktop and your file system, etc. are metaphors of real items. But we don’t mistake the metaphor for its object, even from inanimate objects to their software counterparts (shopping cart to Amazon cart).

Now the metaphors are dealing with humanness, things like intelligence etc. And rather than seeing it as software doing what it always does, taking things and creating software metaphors of them, we are starting to say these are actually what they are named. Saying the artificial intelligence is actually an intelligence.

We’d either have to reduce the definition of intelligence such that calculators are intelligent. Or admit that these tools are not intelligent and are rather ways of exploring the work of actual intelligent beings, work that is found in their training data.

> My view is that these sorts of things are not possible for AI in general.

I wonder what it would take build an artificial system that has these qualities.

> Software deals with metaphors.

This is me wondering again: what's fundamentally different between software running on a machine compared to what's happening in our brains? In both cases you have energy flow following a pattern.

It's conceivable to create a system where energy flows in a particular way.

BTW, we navigate the world of an uncountable number of particles by creating models in our heads of what we think are large things out there. Approximations are made by both artificial and biological systems.

> what's fundamentally different between software running on a machine compared to what's happening in our brains? In both cases you have energy flow following a pattern.

Assuming we’ve scratched the surface of the complexity of the brain. I’d say in one case a human with a will is steering that flow of energy. In the other case it is a probabilistic algorithm steering the flow of energy. The AI is not interacting with world with its own will. I see that as a big difference.

There are presuppositions that go beyond the realm of software engineering that guide one’s views of these things. One is whether you believe the material world is all that is, and that human consciousness is a product of the brain—or that there is such a thing as the soul or spirit of man. From the material perspective you may posit that if you emulate the brain then a sort of AI consciousness could arise. Or that emulating the patterns of the brain equates to emulating personhood. (Though what is material consciousness? I’d say consciousness is by nature immaterial.) I’m not a materialist, and I don’t believe the conclusions that arise from it’s perspectives are accurate.

Well they're language models. You can't capture the human experience in language. Simple as that.

> Is your opinion that these kinds of things are not possible for AI in general, or that these things might be possible but we're just not there yet with modern LLMs?

I used to be on the side of "we're just not there yet [with AI in general]", but after seeing people's response to an algorithm optimized to tickle just their language instinct, I'm actually a little bit more on the fence about it.

> I imagine those latter two can be engineered, no?

Ultimately yes, but not in modern AI systems.

I'm in the same boat, I think some aspects can be engineered, like intention and desire. I'm really curious if it's possible to go the full distance and make AI have experience like we do.

> make AI have experience like we do.

We'll probably have to go analog for that. The only known systems that certainly can experience are mammals (with apparently analog brains).

Not meaningless because part of the discussion is the issue of anthropomorphizing this tech. When we use language like “intelligent” it carries hints of personhood. People begin sadly treating these things as persons.

We can reap the benefits while clearly telling the consumer this is just a language algorithm.

Personhood is poorly defined.

Maybe. I dunno. But it's also something worth to care deeply about.

By that logic you’d have to call other algorithms intelligent.

With more basic algorithms we know that it’s clearly the human programmer and the interpreter of the outputs that are intelligent and not the algorithm itself. For some reason with AI that goes out the window. I believe it should not.