Post

I'm sure the humans learned at least not to run scripts against staging and prod with the same credentials, right? Right? It was all root? Six fingered facepalm!

The term "hallucinate" is so misleading. Didn't know who started using it to characterize LLM mistakes (probably OpenAI people) but people shouldn't just go along and use that term.

Yeah, most of those cyberpunk futures were dystopias to be avoided!

My take on 'vibe coding' :-) bsky.app/profile/cv-d...

So *maybe* a large language model tells you something about how the human brain acquires/uses language. But not about how we actually think. (And possibly also something about the human brain's apparent *need* for higher authorities....)

i conceptualize my brain as containing (but not being) an llm-like system that babbles whatever sounds right, somewhat conditioned on my mental state but not always accurate enough for me to say them honestly

The world's most complicated autocomplete feature, nothing else. These fuckers don't care, they're chasing the dream of employees they don't have to pay.

Exactly. AI output is truth-agnostic. It doesn’t lie. It doesn’t tell the truth. It doesn’t hallucinate. It generates content based on probabilities found in its training data. AI models may be a technological marvel, but they’re not magic. They don’t think. They don’t feel. They don’t understand.

“They’re not autonomous, they’re just unsupervised.”

"BUT I WANT TO MOTORBOAT SEVEN OF NINE'S TITS SOMEDAY!"

Look, a lot of people paid a lot of money to convince a lot of people that Extra Spicy Autocorrect is a robot, and since we really wish we had a robot, it worked. Some people figured out the truth fairly quickly, but some people REALLY want a robot.

A human did do this. They used an automation system with admin privileges and trusted it would somehow magically account for all contingencies. The person who used the automation is the person responsible. There is no other entity.

FFS, this isn't an intelligent being apologizing. It's autocomplete with delusions of grandeur. It puts one word after another based on its database of stolen data on how people write to choose the most likely next word to fulfill the prompt it was given. What is wrong with these credulous fucks?

Word up! Tellem. 🙏

Wait, are you suggesting all these AI girlfriends aren't actually in love with users? I am SHOCKED.

Yeah turns out Sapir Worf was on to something afterall.

To be fair, when the molecules include theobromine...

on some level i think we can understand that this anthropomorphic language is like, purely metaphorical, though lately it seems like people are equivocating more and more. like we used to call computerized opponents in a video game “the AI” without any implication that it has thoughts and feelings!

Or like-- When physicists use "Observed" as the shorthand for "The rest of the outside universe has interacted with this in fucking any way whatsoever" with regards to quantum mechanics-- And quantum woo folks go "OH MY GOD, HUMAN PERCEPTION MAKES QUANTUM THINGS HAPPEN" (no that's not--)

i have funny visions of the "actual" Johnny Five getting into a conversation with AI proselytizers/acolytes and an hour later joining with an angry mob firebombing a data center

An AI doesn't try to defend its response "you didn't like those words, have some different ones" when your coworker or "Jeff from the pub" will tell you they saw it on some website or youtube

yup. I often just tell students (and colleagues, sadly) that something without a nervous system can't hallucinate

Which is why I say "mirage" instead. Something that looks real at a distance, that becomes clearly not as you get closer.

When we take LLM output seriously, *we're* the ones hallucinating.

Asking an AI to explain itself may as well be the same as asking a different AI to explain what it did. It can only take in the context, apply it to the pile of maths generated by the training data, and build some text that is likely to resemble a desirable explanation.

"Answer-shaped response" is the best summation I have seen of AI's actually capabilities thus far.

oh my good god. It learned how to do a horrendous fuckup by ignoring protocol. Hilarious if it was due to something like r/ProgrammingFuckups and thinking people's stories about ignoring the documentation was what they /should/ be doing. XD