LLM advocates still don’t seem to be able to comprehend that ordering the machine not to ‘make stuff up’ doesn’t help. It doesn’t know when it’s making stuff up, and it couldn’t change that even if you told it to. (In fact it’s always just making stuff up, and is only ever true by chance.)
Part of why I’m so negative about them is that their advocates simply do not understand how they work and do not seem to want to.
its because the majority of LLM advocates were poor programmers in the first place
it also explains why companies are so gung ho about LLMs - it covers up their selection & training of programmer failures
@benjamineskola Obasanjo is such a (1) moron, and (2) over-exposed piece of shit.
@prietschka I do recall that a few weeks back he was complaining that LLM advocates get made to feel unwelcome on the fediverse. (OK? I don’t care. It’s nobody’s job to make people feel good about their bad opinions.)
And then just a couple of days ago he was posting something critical, and like … yes this is what we’ve been saying all along.
@benjamineskola The problem with Obasanjo is he's utterly unprincipled and just chasing engagement/self-aggrandizement. His purpose for being in social spaces like Masto/Bluesky/X is to stroke his ego, so everything he does is just an act of public masturbation.
He's interested in self-aggrandizement and self-promotion, nothing more.
Which is why I use the descriptor "piece of shit" with regard to him.
@benjamineskola @prietschka yup, which prompted one of the folks who works on mastodon to go on a weird "we want journalists to come to fedi, right? how can we entice them to come? they're not coming because fedi is a monoculture, and you all don't engage with their views..." good times
@patrick_h_lauke that’s the one. i’m happy for antisocial views to remain unwelcome tbh.
@benjamineskola happy for them to post, but then don't complain when nobody likes/subscribes/hits the bell button/follows them/whatever other made-up number-go-up metric they see as engagement
@patrick_h_lauke yes, true, that’s the problem; they want not only to be allowed to share their bad opinions but to be rewarded for doing so (with internet points).
@benjamineskola it's the "i used to have 2 million followers on twitter...don't you realise who i am?" mentality
@benjamineskola reminds me of meeting with the business side of my job and the marketing people keep thinking if they word the requirements juuuuust right suddenly I'll be able to do the impossible.
May 29, 2026, 3:30 PMLLM are a Skinner Box.
@Aedius @skotchygut @benjamineskola
Designed by wannabe supervillains, built with wartime-scale resources.
The hell do people expect??
May 29, 2026, 3:25 PM@benjamineskola like, fundamentally it has no concept of truth so it cannot evaluate the truthiness of any statement
@solonovamax yes, that is my point
@solonovamax @benjamineskola i feel like it's more that it just wasn't built to give out answers, it was trained not to answer truthfully and "understand" but to just come up with something that sounds kind of convincing
@nelson @solonovamax no, it's not capable of understanding. it's not a thing that this sort of technology could do.
@benjamineskola @solonovamax yeah it's just good at knowing what the next word is, so it can string something mathematically coherent
kind of like how "ai art" tends to be extremely generic looking because it quite literally aims to pick the most average in its dataset for a specific prompt
@nelson @benjamineskola @solonovamax
yeah, i think my take from about a year ago still mostly holds up https://biplus.social/@linkplay/114828181247605258
@linkplay @nelson @benjamineskola @solonovamax
It's just rolling linguistic dice, words bouncing around between probablistic paddles in a bigass pachinko matrix. It's not designed to vet facts. It's designed to regurgitate plausible spitwads that RESEMBLE facts. And the weights behind all those paddles and slots are tuned to whatever agenda the designers wish.
...And the designers serve planetwrecking technofascist war profiteers who party with people like Epstein.
Why would anyone ever trust it with so much as a goddamn casserole recipe??
@nelson @solonovamax @benjamineskola For better and worse, ML is an optimization algorithm designed to provide statistically close-to-ideal responses (with some jitter to break out of bad loops) to arbitrary input based on training (historic data). It's fantastic for, say, industrial control systems that want to keep a chemical reaction under control, but the nature of the math is that you can train it on any sequence of values, and this includes words. The problem is that language has contextual meaning, and the human brain is very much built to see patterns and meaning in things, even when they aren't there. Like how we see faces in clouds, for example. This technology is the faces in clouds engine.
@nelson @solonovamax @benjamineskola If you're at all interested in some of the historic discourse regarding this sort of technology, google John Searle's Chinese room argument.
@complexmath @nelson @solonovamax @benjamineskola
Exactly so. Ada Lovelace, patron saint of code, in the 1840s, gave us "Lady Lovelace’s Objection," whereupon she famously stated that machines "have no pretensions whatever to originate anything," saying they could only perform tasks they were instructed to do.
“AI” LLMs as they are sold to the rubes is just a spellchecker on steroids. It does not reason. It does not think. It correlates data it has been fed to reach a probability.
Telling it to not hallucinate is some serious cargo cult thinking.
May 29, 2026, 5:39 PM@MissConstrue @complexmath @nelson @benjamineskola hypothetically it is possible for an artificial agent (read: "AI") to be capable of accurately modeling the world and "thinking", however it seems that this is not currently even remotely the case.
@solonovamax @MissConstrue @complexmath @nelson I would not expect a large language model to be capable of doing so, no matter how advanced. An ‘AI’ ‘agent’ based on some other technology? Perhaps. But at that point we’re literally just saying ‘technically it’s not impossible for this to exist in future’; we’re in the realm of science fiction.
May 29, 2026, 5:47 PM@benjamineskola @MissConstrue @complexmath @nelson I'm using the word "agent" to not necessarily refer to "AI agents"
see: https://tech.lgbt/@solonovamax/116659064720106166
but yes, I currently believe that an artificial agent capable of thought and accurately modeling the world is science fiction
however I believe it is possible, only based on the fact that the transformer architecture is turing complete. but it might not be efficient for this, it might require like a model that's 10,000x larger than what is currently the largest possible model. I do not believe it is something that is possible in the near future (well, I hope it isn't).
May 29, 2026, 5:49 PM@benjamineskola @MissConstrue @complexmath @nelson the word "agent" is used to mean an actor performing actions to achieve their goal
it can be from something as simple as a thermometer that measures the inside temperature to adjust an HVAC system to remain within a given range (the actions being turning on/off the heat/cooling & the goal being to achieve a given temperature), to as complex as a human
@solonovamax yeah but that’s what I’m saying: if we’re discussing actually-existing “AI” agents it’s impossible and if you want to discuss hypothetical future AI it’s kind of unrelated.
@solonovamax @benjamineskola @MissConstrue @complexmath @nelson
"Turing-complete" and "capable of actually representing reality and reasoning about it" are two very different statements.
@eestileib @solonovamax @benjamineskola @MissConstrue @complexmath reminds me of how much brains actually suck as computers, real brains are full of noise, operate in non-linear scales and are mostly "single-threaded" even though every single neuron works somewhat independently
i think our first mistake was to mistake computation with consciousness
@nelson @eestileib @solonovamax @benjamineskola @complexmath
I think you're on to something there. A lot of AI hype can be seen as a mass pareidoliac hallucination. We're seeing dragons in the clouds.
@MissConstrue @nelson @solonovamax @benjamineskola @complexmath
I don't blame random non techy people or people who don't claim to know any philosophy for thinking chatbots are intelligent when all of their social sources of proof (rich people, relatives, the people on tv and YouTube) say it is and it seems like it is.
I rely on social proof to pick what food I eat all the time, it's not such a bad reasoning method for stuff you can't research yourself.
But people with CS or math or history or philosophy degrees (including all PhDs) should be ashamed of themselves if they tell other people that chatbots "think" or are "alive" or "apologize" or "feel bad".
That is a failure to use their intellectual training, and it is fucking over people who use their social status to form opinions on these matters.
Generative Textual Functionalism is just yet another extractive religion.
@solonovamax @complexmath @nelson @benjamineskola
Theoretically, yes. But I point you towards one of my favorite long term AI projects, Cyc. (Whom I haven’t checked up on since Doug died.). I knew Doug since the 80s, and sort of stayed in the loop with what they were doing, because trying to develop an ontological system fascinates me. I want it to happen, I just don’t think we have the compute yet. I’m not sure it can be done with anything less than quantum.
But Doug’s vision of AI had nothing really in common with current LLM, especially since nobody has come up with a way for it to be commercially viable, because that wasn’t the vision. Knowledge was the dream. As electric dreams go, it was a pretty groovy one.
May 29, 2026, 5:57 PM@MissConstrue @complexmath @nelson @benjamineskola I don't think you necessarily need anything quantum for it, just some very powerful classical computational device (based on the fact that given our current understanding of the human brain, they do not do any quantum-like processing. also the fact that quantum computers have been "just a few years away" for what, like 30 years now?)
but yeah, I find AI in concept quite interesting. if you'd asked me pre-chatgpt, that's what I wanted to specialize into.
now? god, that shit just sounds so fucking exhausting. I do not want anything to do with it. I want to stay as far away from it as possible.
May 29, 2026, 5:34 PM@nelson @benjamineskola agents (the general word for entities performing actions to achieve their goal, not talking about necessarily "AI agents", this word even applies to people, and even something like a thermostat that controls temperature) that wish to achieve their goals should be able to accurately model the real world
their ability to model the real world is directly correlated with their ability to achieve their goals. so, an agent which can accurately model the real world is able to achieve its goal much more easily that one that cannot accurately model the real world
and, people generally call an accurate model of the real world "truth"
hypothetically, the transformer architecture should be able to scale to human-level intelligence as it is turing-complete.
so, how it was trained doesn't necessarily matter, it's just that it is not capable of modeling the real world, so it cannot evaluate the truthiness of a statement
May 29, 2026, 5:34 PM@nelson @benjamineskola for a theoretical super-intelligence that is extremely good at modeling the real world, the ability to say something that sounds convincing but is false would be extremely natural, as it would be able to accurately predict when it should lie to achieve its end goals.
however, LLMs are not at all doing this. it just seems they can't model the real world, instead their model of the real world is inaccurate so they 'hallucinate' things, aka 'lie'
@solonovamax @benjamineskola Exactly — IT DOESN’T THINK. It’s not a mind, but just a huge statistical matrix.
(And in top of that, don’t folks like this feel ashamed that their job has devolved to pleading with a mindless idiot genie, rather than writing deterministic code?)
@michaelgemar @solonovamax Yes precisely. An argument that a huge statistical matrix is useful for certain tasks is valid.
(I disagree. It seems bad at all the tasks people want to use it for, as well as wasteful and soul-destroying. But it’s at least valid.)
But pretending it’s doing something that it isn’t undermines any possibility of actual usefulness.
@benjamineskola @solonovamax I’m sure that there is genuine utility in LLMs and the newer approaches to AI in general. But too many people are being led astray by LLMs intentional appearance of mentality so that they interact with them as people, as having understanding. That is wrong and risks terrible errors in the final product.
@michaelgemar @solonovamax @benjamineskola I'm trying to convert my suddenly boss obsessed with our overlords pushing AI down our throats to at least use AI not as process but to at least write crappy but deterministic code :(
@benjamineskola I don't partake on the LLM stuff but they've already proved some degree of usefulness.
I don't think people in general would trust them with sensitive (health, well being) stuff but from what I hear, some people are very good at wielding it as a tool.
I don't know how my car works, I'd be a terrible mechanic and racer. Still, it's very handy tool for me to move around.
@junkman sorry, did I seem like I was interested in yet another defence of LLMs?
@benjamineskola nah, man. You do you, proceed with the dunking.
@junkman @benjamineskola these fuckers just can't fucking resist pissing in the thread so they'll like the flavour better
@junkman like in all seriousness it's fine to have some degree of missing knowledge about how your car works, but if you believe that it's capable of avoiding collisions by itself and your method of reducing collisions is just to ask it to try harder, you'd be a danger to yourself and others.
I'm not asking people to have deep knowledge of the mathematics behind LLMs, but I do expect people who are actively advocating their adoption not to make up outright fantasies about how they work.
@junkman I see your car analogy and I raise you a slavery analogy: that, too, had “proved some degree of usefulness” for “some people very good at wielding it as a tool”.
And I bet you’d rather not know how it worked (works) if you were the one finding it handy for the benefits it provided you. Saying you don’t partake while loudly proclaiming its usefulness is not fooling anyone.
@mushroom_man that analogy is also useful.
I don't like that the whole LLM functionality is based on stealing humanity's knowledge for profit. Outright violated (shitty) copyright law and basically the regular people got screwed over while mega corporations just agreed not to make a big fuzz about it.
The foundations are so rotten and just so people can chat with their computers instead of doing manual pointing and typing.
May 29, 2026, 3:29 PMThat's funny when you explain to people how it really works, if they are not LLM advocates, they see exactly why it can't work.
It's literally created with to make stuff up.
@Aedius yes, like... if you accept that this is just how they work, you might be able to use them productively for the limited tasks they're capable of doing at. But refusing to understand the way they work and then yelling at them about it is just embarrassing.
@Aedius @benjamineskola language consists of two parts, the form and the sign
the form is the "tangible" part of the language, e.g. this text, or whatever soundwave physics bullshit is happening when we talk
the sign is the meaning, what you might visualize in your head when you read the word "cat"
LLMs only have access to form, so when the meaning of text is important (read: always), LLMs are not very useful
to this, promptfondlers always reply "but today is the worst it's ever gonna be"
May 29, 2026, 5:49 PM@SheRaPantsuit @benjamineskola
I will add that to my presentation for the nexts teams at work ^^
@Aedius @benjamineskola credit where it is due, I more or less stole this explanation from Dr. Emily Bender. Recommend checking out her podcast with Dr. Alex Hanna, where they roast Generative AI nonsense in the vein of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It is cathartic.
https://dair-institute.org/maiht3k/
(I am not a linguist so please don't take my comments on language as authoritative.)
@SheRaPantsuit
“promptfondlers”! I love it!
Grand Theft AutoComplete is the best description I’ve come across for LLMs.
@Su_G @Aedius @benjamineskola I shamelessly stole the term from @davidgerard
@benjamineskola "hey convincing-bullshit-a-tron2000, i want you to stop making up bullshit when you answer to me"
"ok"
@nelson @benjamineskola "hey machine that's been trained to put together the kind of words people use if they're being deferential, do what I tell you"
"ok"
@benjamineskola
It's all halucinations, there's just a magical line where we don't mind the output on the one side and we do on the other. There is literally no distinction between the two
@bloognoo yes, that’s exactly my point.
May 29, 2026, 3:40 PMAny LLM output that takes more than a few seconds of low mental effort to check (so anything more than a line or two of tab complete in a strongly typed coding language in an IDE with built in error underlining) makes me want to throw my computer out of the window.
I don't know how some people use it to generate a whole paragraph let alone multiple.