If it was just autocomplete in the dismissive sense, white noise should make it derail into white noise. Instead it tries to make sense of it. Why? Because it learned strong language priors from us and it leans on that when the prompt is meaningless. It tries to make sense of it.
“Not human understanding” ≠ “no reasoning-like computation.”
Those aren’t the same thing.
People doing the "Fancy autocomplete” thing are doing the laziest possible move: not human, therefore nothing interesting happening. I disagree with that.
It doesn’t “understand,” like we do and it’s not infallible, but calling it “fancy autocomplete” is like calling a jet engine “fancy candle.”
Same category of thing, wildly different behavior.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
No, it doesn’t. You’re in sci-fi land. There is no “it” “trying to make sense”. That cogitation is happening in YOU, not the motherboard.
SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 1 day ago
“The cogitation is happening in YOU” is just the philosophical zombie argument dressed up as a gotcha. Sure, there’s no ghost in the machine - but that’s true of your neurons too. Your brain is also “just” electrochemical signals on wet hardware. Does that mean your understanding is happening somewhere else?
The point isn’t whether there’s a homunculus sitting inside the GPU having feelings. The point is that the functional operations happening - maintaining context, resolving ambiguity, applying something structurally similar to inference across novel inputs - are more than pattern-matching in the (dismissive sense) people mean when they say “autocomplete.”
Iconoclast@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Touché.
Intelligence doesn’t require “self” and we’re a living proof of that. The way LLMs and humans operate have much more similarities than people like to admit. We’re just applying higher standards to AI.