Genuinely one of the all time best Black Mirror episodes

“Drink verification can to continue…”

+1 on the Nebula subscription. It’s worth every penny. That and Dropout are the only streaming subscriptions I still maintain.

While truly defining pretty much any aspect of human intelligence is functionally impossible with our current understanding of the mind, we can create some very usable “good enough” working definitions for these purposes.

At a basic level, “reasoning” would be the act of drawing logical conclusions from available data. And that’s not what these models do. They mimic reasoning, by mimicking human communication. Humans communicate (and developed a lot of specialized language with which to communicate) the process by which we reason, and so LLMs can basically replicate the appearance of reasoning by replicating the language around it.

The way you can tell that they’re not actually reasoning is simple; their conclusions often bear no actual connection to the facts. There’s an example I linked elsewhere where the new model is asked to list states with W in their name. It does a bunch of preamble where it spells out very clearly what the requirements and process are; assemble a list of all states, then check each name for the presence of the letter W.

And then it includes North Dakota, South Dakota, North Carolina and South Carolina in the list.

Any human being capable of reasoning would absolutely understand that that was wrong, if they were taking the time to carefully and systematically work through the problem in that way. The AI does not, because all this apparent “thinking” is a smoke show. They’re machines built to give the appearance of intelligence, nothing more.

When real AGI, or even something approaching it, actually becomes a thing, I will be extremely excited. But this is just snake oil being sold as medicine. You’re not required to buy into their bullshit just to prove you’re not a technophobe.

You mean like this chain of thought?

Read some history mate. The luddites weren’t technophobes either. They hated the way that capitalism was reaping all the rewards of industrializion. They were all for technological advancement, they just wanted it to benefit everyone.

More and more advanced tools for automation are an important part of creating a post-scarcity future. If we can combine that with tearing down our current economic system - which inherently requires and thus has to manufacture scarcity - we can uplift our species in ways we can currently only imagine.

But this ain’t it bud. If I ask you for water and you hand me a glass of warm piss, I’m not “against drinking water” for refusing to gulp it down.

This isn’t AI. It isn’t - meaningfully and usefully - any form of automation at all. A bunch of conmen slapped the letters “AI” on the side of their bottle of piss and you’re drinking it down like it’s grandma’s peach tea.

The people calling out the fundamental flaws with these products aren’t doing so because we hate the entire concept of automation, any more than someone exposing a snake-oil salesman hates medicine. What we hate is being lied to. The current state of this technology is bullshit and hype. It is not fit for human consumption (other than recreationally) and the money being pumped into it could be put to far better uses. OpenAI may have lofty goals, but they have utterly failed at achieving them, and right now any true desire to create AGI has been totally subsumed by the need to keep pumping out slightly better looking versions of the same polished turd in order to convince investors to keep paying for their staggeringly high hosting costs.

This example doesn’t prove what you think it does. It shows pattern detection - something computers are inherently very well suited for - but it doesn’t demonstrate “reasoning” in any meaningful way.

It’s weird how so many of these “technophobes” are IT professionals. Crazy that people would line up to go into a profession they so obviously hate and fear.

Fuck you, that made me smile. And I haven’t even had my coffee yet.

I hate to say it bud, but the fact that you feel like you have more productive conversations with highly advanced autocomplete than you do with actual humans probably says more about you than it does about the current state of generative AI.

These things sound analogous if you know very little about how both generative AI and the human creative process actually work.

The reasonable in-between is despising without presently fearing.

GenAI is a plagiarism engine. That’s really not something that can be defended. But as a means of automating away the jobs of writers it has proven itself to be so deeply deficient that there’s very little to fear at this time.

The arrival of these tools has, however, served as a wake up call to groups like the screenwriters guild, and I’m very glad that they’re getting proper rules in place now before these tools become “good enough” to start producing the kind of low grade verbal slurry that Hollywood will happily accept.

No words can express how little interest I have in Bill Gates opinion on how I should write.

Quite why NaNoWriMo needs to have an opinion about the use of generative AI is beyond me.

A major sponsor of NaNoWriMo is ProWritingAid, who are pushing their new AI Sparks genAI writing tool.

So, at a guess, I’d say that’s why.

I’ll bet your boot process is a lot shorter too.