Saying “it’s a text generator” cannot be the full force of your criticism, if the text it generates is incredibly useful. What could AI be on a screen if not a text generator?
Your views have got to be formed by WHAT text is generated given that AI cannot express itself through any other channel than text.
If you can give AI a deeply complex code base and ask it to find the likely cause of an obscure bug, and the solution is right, then you’ll have to acknowledge that some form of reasoning is going on, no?
And given that no other system has previously enabled this form of reasoning, it seems a shame to judge AI on semantics, rather than usefulness.
You are on Lemmy so defending AI use will net you down votes. I am an anti-AI person, practically, but you make a very fair and objective point. 👍 I up vote you, not because I agree with AI use but because this is a proper point to make in a proper discussion, which is what this place should be about.
It can’t reason. It doesn’t think. It makes shit up as it was trained to do. It can sort of detect patterns and make a guess about what response would get it the highest score, but it’s so error-prone that a human has to verify the output anyway. It’s difficult to tell whether the perceived benefits outweigh the costs. There are many different types of LLMs and use cases.
As a person who values life and our environment, I’d rather not participate in the sloppification of our world. As a Linux user, I am wary of vibe coded flaws slipping under the radar and screwing up my system.
Again, we are stuck in a semantics debate. What I call reasoning you don’t, it seems.
But all I know, as someone that has worked in software engineering for 25+ years, is that the output of whatever it does, and whatever you call it, is incredibly useful.
Saying “it just generates text” is a reflexive reaction that attempts to flatten the nuance.
All Columbus did was sail west.
All America did was throw some fuel into a tube and put Neil Armstrong on the top.
All Picasso did was to throw some paint onto a cloth.
All this PhD student did was generate text.
Surely we’ve got to have some more nuance in there. If there’s a difference between 10000 monkeys hacking on a typewriter and a human writing their doctoral thesis, the quality of their act isn’t in whether text was generated but WHAT text was generated.
I have to verify the output of what humans generate, too. I’m constantly looking at the source of claims. The AI is no different and it’s not nearly as wrong as a Person is.
Which is way more complex than just predicting text, because you have to predict physics and all that stuff. There is a reason most robots controlled by neural nets have failed hilariously so far.
then you’ll have to acknowledge that some form of reasoning is going on, no?
By that logic you could say a compiler is reasoning. But the reasoning displayed was happening when the compiler (or LLM training material respectively) was written.
If you can give AI a deeply complex code base and ask it to find the likely cause of an obscure bug, and the solution is right, then you’ll have to acknowledge that some form of reasoning is going on, no?
Absolutely not. LLMs are just prediction engines for words.
If a LLM has the right answer, it only means that the model had the correct training data for your issue. Nothing more.
I’m just a movement generator.
Saying “it’s a text generator” cannot be the full force of your criticism, if the text it generates is incredibly useful. What could AI be on a screen if not a text generator?
Your views have got to be formed by WHAT text is generated given that AI cannot express itself through any other channel than text.
If you can give AI a deeply complex code base and ask it to find the likely cause of an obscure bug, and the solution is right, then you’ll have to acknowledge that some form of reasoning is going on, no?
And given that no other system has previously enabled this form of reasoning, it seems a shame to judge AI on semantics, rather than usefulness.
You are on Lemmy so defending AI use will net you down votes. I am an anti-AI person, practically, but you make a very fair and objective point. 👍 I up vote you, not because I agree with AI use but because this is a proper point to make in a proper discussion, which is what this place should be about.
Kudos.
It can’t reason. It doesn’t think. It makes shit up as it was trained to do. It can sort of detect patterns and make a guess about what response would get it the highest score, but it’s so error-prone that a human has to verify the output anyway. It’s difficult to tell whether the perceived benefits outweigh the costs. There are many different types of LLMs and use cases.
As a person who values life and our environment, I’d rather not participate in the sloppification of our world. As a Linux user, I am wary of vibe coded flaws slipping under the radar and screwing up my system.
Again, we are stuck in a semantics debate. What I call reasoning you don’t, it seems.
But all I know, as someone that has worked in software engineering for 25+ years, is that the output of whatever it does, and whatever you call it, is incredibly useful.
Saying “it just generates text” is a reflexive reaction that attempts to flatten the nuance.
All Columbus did was sail west.
All America did was throw some fuel into a tube and put Neil Armstrong on the top.
All Picasso did was to throw some paint onto a cloth.
All this PhD student did was generate text.
Surely we’ve got to have some more nuance in there. If there’s a difference between 10000 monkeys hacking on a typewriter and a human writing their doctoral thesis, the quality of their act isn’t in whether text was generated but WHAT text was generated.
I have to verify the output of what humans generate, too. I’m constantly looking at the source of claims. The AI is no different and it’s not nearly as wrong as a Person is.
Which is way more complex than just predicting text, because you have to predict physics and all that stuff. There is a reason most robots controlled by neural nets have failed hilariously so far.
By that logic you could say a compiler is reasoning. But the reasoning displayed was happening when the compiler (or LLM training material respectively) was written.
You might be a few years behind. We have robots outpacing human performance in specific tasks using neural networks.
Also, LLMs can perform on tasks they weren’t explicitly trained for. This line is not as well defined as you make it sound.
Absolutely not. LLMs are just prediction engines for words.
If a LLM has the right answer, it only means that the model had the correct training data for your issue. Nothing more.
That is absolutely not how it works at all
Uh huh, and how does it work?
What do you mean? That’s exactly how LLMs work. That’s why they “hallucinate”.
No they hallucinate because they lose context but are tasked to answer anyways. They also don’t really lose context as much as they did a year ago.
Their training data has nothing to do with it unless you’re using a local one without web access.
ML is my career and I’ve been doing it for decades. You’re wrong. LLMs hallucinate with full context.
I miss when we thought the future was ML.
That is no criticism, just a statement.
My criticism goes to people who assign some metaphysical meaning to AI, or want to treat all it’s output like a contagious pest.