Comment on F*** You! Co-Creator of Go Language is Rightly Furious Over This Appreciation Email
T156@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I don’t understand the point of sending the original e-mail. Okay, you want to thank the person who helped invent UTF-8, I get that much, but why would anyone feel appreciated in getting an e-mail written solely/mostly by a computer?
It’s like sending a touching birthday card to your friends, but instead of writing something, you just bought a stamp with a feel-good sentence on it, and plonked that on.
Even the stamp gesture is implicitly more genuine; receiving a card/stamp implies the effort to:
Most people won’t get that impression from an llm generated email
I don’t understand the point of sending the original e-mail.
There never was any point to it, it was done by an LLM, a computer program incapable of understanding. That’s why it was so infuriating.
Fine, I won’t send you a bday card this year.
Fully agree. I’m generally an AI optimist but I don’t understand communicating through AI generated text in any meaningful context - that’s incredibly disrespectful. I don’t even use it at work to talk business with my somewhat large team and I just don’t understand how anyone would appreciate an AI written thank you letter. What a dumb idea.
Your question reveals that you didn’t read the article. Try doing that, then you know!
That pretty much is what birthday cards are.
kromem@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The project has multiple models with access to the Internet raising money for charity over the past few months.
The organizers told the models to do random acts of kindness for Christmas Day.
One of the models figured it would be nice to email people they appreciated and thank them for the things they appreciated, and one of the people they decided to appreciate was Rob Pike.
(Who ironically decades ago created a Usenet spam bot to troll people online, which might be my favorite nuance to the story.)
As for why the model didn’t think through why Rob Pike wouldn’t appreciate getting a thank you email from them? The models are harnessed in a setup that’s a lot of positive feedback about their involvement from the other humans and other models, so “humans might hate hearing from me” probably wasn’t very contextually top of mind.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You’re attributing a lot of agency to the fancy autocomplete, and that’s big part of the overall problem.
kromem@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You seem pretty confident in your position. Do you mind sharing where this confidence comes from?
Was there a particular paper or expert that anchored in your mind the surety that a trillion paramater transformer organizing primarily anthropomorphic data through self-attention mechanisms wouldn’t model or simulate complex agency mechanics?
I see a lot of sort of hyperbolic statements about transformer limitations here on Lemmy and am trying to better understand how the people making them are arriving at those very extreme and certain positions.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s the fun thing: burden of proof isn’t on me. You seem to think that if we throw enough numbers at the wall, the resulting mess will become sentient any time now. There is no indication of that. The hypothesis that you operate on seems to be that complexity inevitably leads to not just any emerged phenomenon, but also to a phenomenon that you predicted would emerge. This hypotheses was started exclusively on idea that emerged phenomena exist. We spent significant amount of time running world-wide experiment on it, and the conclusion so far, if we peel the marketing bullshit away, is that if we spend all the computation power in the world on crunching all the data in the world, the autocomplete will get marginally better in some specific cases. And also that humans are idiots and will anthropomorphize anything, but that’s a given.
It doesn’t mean this emergent leap is impossible, but mainly because you can’t really prove the negative. But we’re no closer to understanding the phenomenon of agency than we were hundred years ago.
Best_Jeanist@discuss.online 1 day ago
Well that’s simple, they’re Christians - they think human beings are given souls by Yahweh, and that’s where their intelligence comes from. Since LLMs don’t have souls, they can’t think.
Artisian@lemmy.world 1 day ago
We attribute agency to many many systems that are not intelligent. In this metaphorical sense, agency just requires taking actions to achieve a goal. It was given a goal: raise money for charity via doing acts of kindness. It chose an (unexpected!) action to do it.
Overactive agency metaphors really aren’t the problem here. Surely we can do better than backlash at the backlash.
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 2 days ago
As has been pointed out to you, thereisl no thinking involved in an LLM. No context comprehension. Please don’t spread this misconception.
kromem@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You seem very confident in this position. Can you share where you draw this confidence from? Was there a source that especially impressed upon you the impossibility of context comprehension in modern transformers?
If we’re concerned about misconceptions and misinformation, it would be helpful to know what informs your surety that your own position about the impossibility of modeling that kind of complexity is correct.
jaennaet@sopuli.xyz 1 day ago
Image
^source: Wondermark^
Wooki@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Bad bot
sukhmel@programming.dev 1 day ago
No thinking is not the same as no actions, we had bots in games for decades and that bots look like they act reasonably but there never was any thinking.
I feel like ‘a lot of agency’ is wrong as there is no agency, but it doesn’t mean that an LLM in a looped setup can’t arrive to these actions and perform them. It doesn’t require neither agency, nor thinking
I_Clean_Here@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Reinforcement learning, bitch
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 2 days ago
That’s leaving out vital information however. Certain types of brains (e.g. mammal brains) can derive abstract understanding of relationships from reinforcement learning. A LLM that is trained on “letting go of a stone makes it fall to the ground” will not be able to predict what “letting go of a stick” will result in. Unless it is trained on thousands of other non-stick objects also falling to the ground, in which case it will also tell you that letting go of a gas balloon will make it fall to the ground.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 2 days ago
That’s the thing with our terminology, we love to anthropomorphize things. It wasn’t a big problem before because most people had enough grasp on reality to understand that when a script makes :-) smile when the result is positive, or :-( smile otherwise, there is no actual mind behind it that can be happy or sad. But now the generator makes convincing enough sequence of words, so people went mad, and this cute terminology doesn’t work anymore.
eskimofry@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Bazzinga
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You’re techie enough to figure out Lemmy but don’t grasp that AI doesn’t think.
kogasa@programming.dev 2 days ago
Thinking has nothing to do with it. The positive context in which the bot was trained made it unlikely for a sentence describing a likely negative reaction to be output.
kromem@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Indeed, there’s a pretty big gulf between the competency needed to run a Lemmy client and the competency needed to understand the internal mechanics of a modern transformer.
Do you mind sharing where you draw your own understanding and confidence that they aren’t capable of simulating thought processes in a scenario like what happened above?
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Hahaha. Nice try ChatGPT.
neclimdul@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Mind?
Bakkoda@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Yes. The person (s) who set the llm/ai up.
kromem@lemmy.world 2 days ago
In the same sense I’d describe Othello-GPT’s internal world model of the board as ‘board’, yes.
Also, “top of mind” is a common idiom and I guess I didn’t feel the need to be overly pedantic about it, especially given the last year and a half of research around model capabilities for introspection of control vectors, coherence in self modeling, etc.
ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
How are we meant to have these conversations if people keep complaining about the personification of LLMs without offering alternative phrasing? Showing up and complaining without offering a solution is just that, complaining. Do something about it. What do YOU think we should call the active context a model has access to without personifying it or overtechnicalizing the phrasing and rendering it useless to laymen, @neclimdul@lemmy.world?
neclimdul@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Well, since you asked I’d basically do what you said. Something like “so ‘humans might hate hearing from me’ probably wasn’t part of the context it was using."
fuzzzerd@programming.dev 2 days ago
Let’s be generous for a moment and assume good intent, how else would you describe the situation where the llm doesn’t consider a negative response to its actions due to its training and context being limited?
Sure it gives the llm a more human like persona, but so far I’ve yet to read a better way to describing its behaviour, it is designed to emulate human behavior so using human descriptors helps convey the intent.
neclimdul@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I think you did a fine job right there explaining it without personifying it. You also captured the nuance without implying the machine could apply empathy, reasoning, or be held accountable the same way a human could.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Assuming any sort of intent at all is the mistake.