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  • solosolonovamax@tech.lgbt
    May 29, 2026, 3:25 PM

    @benjamineskola like, fundamentally it has no concept of truth so it cannot evaluate the truthiness of any statement

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  • Nelson Lopeznelson@wetdry.world
    May 29, 2026, 3:30 PM

    @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

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  • Nelson Lopeznelson@wetdry.world
    May 29, 2026, 3:32 PM

    @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

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  • Violet Maddervioletmadder@kolektiva.social
    May 30, 2026, 6:44 PM

    @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??

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  • Seancomplexmath@hachyderm.io
    May 29, 2026, 4:57 PM

    @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.

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  • MissConstrueMissConstrue@mefi.social
    May 29, 2026, 5:36 PM

    @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.

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  • benbenjamineskola@hachyderm.io
    May 29, 2026, 5:41 PM

    @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.

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  • solosolonovamax@tech.lgbt
    May 29, 2026, 5:47 PM

    @benjamineskola @MissConstrue @complexmath @nelson I'm using the word "agent" to not necessarily refer to "AI agents"

    see: tech.lgbt/@solonovamax/1166590

    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).

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  • solosolonovamax@tech.lgbt
    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

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  • benbenjamineskola@hachyderm.io
    May 29, 2026, 5:53 PM

    @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.

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  • eestileib (she/hers)eestileib@tech.lgbt
    May 29, 2026, 7:43 PM

    @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.

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  • MissConstrueMissConstrue@mefi.social
    May 29, 2026, 5:51 PM

    @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.

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  • solosolonovamax@tech.lgbt
    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.

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  • solosolonovamax@tech.lgbt
    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

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  • solosolonovamax@tech.lgbt
    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'

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  • Michael Gemarmichaelgemar@cosocial.ca
    May 29, 2026, 3:35 PM

    @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?)

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  • benbenjamineskola@hachyderm.io
    May 29, 2026, 3:39 PM

    @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.

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  • Michael Gemarmichaelgemar@cosocial.ca
    May 29, 2026, 3:45 PM

    @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.

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