Fooling people is evidently all you need to do to become President of the United States and Commander In Chief of the world’s largest military with personal control over a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons. Fast talking computers could be dangerous when they’re infinitely faster, and probably smarter and slightly less neurotic than the current president. “Hey, come to think of it, has anyone ever even seen the 2028 president-elect on anything other than a screen?”
lectricleopard@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You’re missing my point. An LLM can’t be “smarter” or “smart” at all. It isn’t sentient or conscious. It doesn’t even have a stable internal model of the world. What people call “hallucinations” are simply the random words selected at the edges of its convincing predictive power. Personification of LLMs is all marketing. They’re really just well presented statistical models.
cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
I think you’re missing mine. I know it’s not clever. I think everything it creates is either slop, plagiarism and almost always both.
My point is: An arbitrary random number generator without any stable internal model of the world would still be a bad thing if it can, without any conscious intention, trick/confuse people into thinking its so awesome and clever that they choose it to be emperor of Earth, leader of the economy, decider of reality, and build it a great throne upon which they can worship it and and an altar to burn oil on as a sacrifice to the environment. That’s what LLMs are doing. It doesn’t matter whether the LLMs intend to, it doesn’t matter whether they have intentions at all. What matters is that it’s so “well presented” that people fall for it. It’s the effectiveness it has at making people fall for it that’s the problem. Dismissing those people as weak, naive, stupid can’t be done because their actions matter, their votes matter, their financial choices matter, they’re part of the civilization we live in, and frankly, they seem to be the majority.
lectricleopard@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I think where we may differ in opinion is where the power lies in this situation. To me its all about have the money for the computer, which means is propaganda for the wealthy. That’s nothing new. I do not expect a significant increase in societal support for these types of messages. At least not on a historical scale.
You seem to imply the LLM can at the very least have an emergent agenda, or seeming agenda, of its own. I do not believe that to be the case. LLMs that generate output that doesn’t align with the monied interests will be considered misaligned and discarded.