Comment on Mind-reading AI can translate brainwaves into written text: Using only a sensor-filled helmet combined with artificial intelligence, a team of scientists has announced they can turn a person’s thou...

• orgrinrt@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’ve always wondered with stances like this, why do you assume that our “intelligence” is much different than that of llms? I mean, as much as we like to feel superior, is there anything that would really prove that our brains don’t work in a similar manner behind the curtains? What if we just get input stimuli and our mind is simply the process of figuring out the most likely answers, reactions or whatever, to that?

  I haven’t seen anything to that effect, but then again my field of study is vastly different. I’d like to be enlightened certainly!

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  • knightly@pawb.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    LLMs are statistical models of human writing, they only offer the appearance of intelligence in the same fashion as the Chinese Room thought experiment.

    There’s nothing “intelligent” in there, just a very large set of instructions for transforming inputs into outputs.

    A sufficiently advanced model of the human brain can be “intelligent” in the same way that humans are, but this would not be “artificial” since it would necessarily employ the same “natural” processes as our brains.

    Until we have a model of “intelligence” itself, anyone claiming to have “AI” is just trying to sell you something.

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    • orgrinrt@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What I wonder, though, is if it isn’t possible to describe human brain, and the nervous system as a whole, as a very large set of instructions for transforming inputs into outputs?

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      • knightly@pawb.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        It could be described that way, but it wouldn’t be a very apt metaphor. We aren’t simple, stateful input-to-output algorithms, but a confluence of innate tendencies, learned experiences, acquired habits, unconscious motivations, and capable of modifying our own thought processes and behavior on the fly to suit whatever best fits the local context. Our brains encode a model of the world we live in that includes models of ourselves and the other people we interact with, all built in realtime from our observations without conscious effort.

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• Not_mikey@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This seems like circular reasoning. SAT scores don’t measure intelligence because llm can pass it which isn’t intelligent.

  Why isn’t the llm intelligent?

  Because it can only pass tests that don’t measure intelligence.

  You still haven’t answered what intelligence is or what an a.i. would be. Without a definition you just fall into the trap of “A.I. is whatever computers cant do” which has been going on for a while:

  Computers can do arithmetic but they can’t do calculus, that requires true intelligence.

  Ok computers can do calculus, but they can’t beat someone in chess, that requires true intelligence.

  Ok computers can beat us in chess, but they can’t form coherent sentences and ideas, that requires true intelligence.

  Ok computers can form coherent sentences but …

  It’s all just moving the goal post to try and preserve some exclusively human/organic claim to intelligence.

  There is one goalpost that has stayed steady, the turing test, which llm seems to have passed, at least for shorter conversation.

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  • knightly@pawb.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This seems like circular reasoning. SAT scores don’t measure intelligence because llm can pass it which isn’t intelligent.

    The purpose of the SAT isn’t to measure intelligence, it is to rank students on their ability to answer test questions.

    A copy of the answer key could get a perfect score, do you think that means it’s “intelligence” is equivalent to a person with perfect SATs?

    Why isn’t the llm intelligent?

    For the same reason that the SAT answer key or an instruction manual isn’t, the ability to answer questions is not the foundation of intelligence but an emergent property thereof.

    You still haven’t answered what intelligence is or what an a.i. would be.

    Computer scientists, neurologists, and philosophers can’t answer that either, or else we’d already have the algorithms we’d need to build human-equivalent AI.

    Without a definition you just fall into the trap of “A.I. is whatever computers cant do” which has been going on for a while:

    Exactly, you’re just falling into the Turing Trap instead. Just because a company can convince you that it’s program is intelligent doesn’t mean it is, or else chatbots from 10 years ago would qualify.

    There is one goalpost that has stayed steady, the turing test, which llm seems to have passed, at least for shorter conversation.

    The Turing Test is just a slightly modified version of a Victorian-era social deduction game. It doesn’t measure intelligence, but the ability to mimic a human conversation. Turing himself acknowledged this: smithsonianmag.com/…/turing-test-measures-somethi…

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    • Not_mikey@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      computer scientists, neurologists, and philosophers can’t answer that either, or else we’d already have the algorithms we’d need to build human equivalent A.I.

      I think your mixing up sentience / consciousness with intelligence. What is consciousness doesn’t have a good answer right now and like you said philosophers, computer scientists and neurologist can’t come to a clear answer but most think llms aren’t conscious.

      Intelligence on the other hand does have more concrete definitions that at least computer scientists use that usually revolve around the ability to solve diverse problems and answer questions outside of the entities original training set / database. Yes doing an SAT test with the answer key isn’t intelligent because that’s in your “database” and is just a matter of copying over the answers. LLMs don’t do this though, it doesn’t do a lookup of past SAT questions it’s seen and answer it, it uses some process of “reasoning” to do it. If you gave an LLM an SAT question that was not in it’s original training set it would probably still answer it correctly.

      That isn’t to say that LLMs are the be all and end all of intelligence, there are different types of intelligence corresponding to the set of problems that intelligence is solving. A plant identification A.I. is intelligent for being able to identify various plants in different scenarios but it completely lacks any emotional, conversational intelligence, etc. The same can be said of a botanist who also may be able to identify plants but may lack some artistic intelligence to depict them. Intelligence comes in many forms.

      Different tests can measure different forms of intelligence. The SAT measures a couple like reasoning, rhetoric, scientific etc. The turing test measures conversational intelligence , and the article you showed doesn’t seem to show a quote from him saying that it doesn’t measure intelligence, but turing would probably agree it doesn’t measure some sort of general intelligence, just one facet.

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      • nevemsenki@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        LLMs don’t do this though, it doesn’t do a lookup of past SAT questions it’s seen and answer it, it uses some process of “reasoning” to do it.

        The “reasoning” in LLM is literally statistical probability of which word would follow which word. It has no real concept of what it talks about beyond the pre-built relationship matrices between words and language rules. That’s why LLMs confidently hallucinate obvious bullshit time to time - to them there’s no meaning to either truthful or absolute bonkers text, it’s just words that should probably follow each other.

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      • knightly@pawb.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yes doing an SAT test with the answer key isn’t intelligent because that’s in your “database” and is just a matter of copying over the answers. LLMs don’t do this though, it doesn’t do a lookup of past SAT questions it’s seen and answer it, it uses some process of “reasoning” to do it.

        You’ve now reduced the “process of reasoning” to hitting the autocomplete button until your keyboard spits out an answer from a database of prior conversations. It might be cleverly designed, but generative models are no more intelligent than an answer key or a library’s card catalog. Any “intelligence” they appear to encode actually comes from the people who did the work to assemble the training database.

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