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100 sats \ 3 replies \ @Scoresby OP 22 Sep \ parent \ on: Plausibility is not truth | Robert Hutton | The Critic Magazine AI
so, it sounds like you are saying the steelman is that we don't know that it's not doing more than statistical next-word generation (this is my grug understanding of AI, which will stand in lieu of everything short of consciousness or human-like thinking).
but this is highly unsatisfying to me! I am willing to engage with the idea that there is something more than statistics going on, but I don't think this personification is helping us understand what it is.
also, I'm pretty convinced so far that LLMs don't have any real sense of "understanding" -- something that many personification words imply is present.
No, I'm not saying it's doing more than statistical pattern matching. I'm saying we as humans may not be doing more either. So if we can use words like "understanding" to describe ourselves, why can't we use it to describe AI?
For the record I am not a pure materialist, and I think humans have souls, so I don't think we're just statistical pattern matchers. I'm just trying to steel man the case
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Ah! I see.
In that case, I'd say whatever statistical pattern matching humans are doing feels different than LLMs. When I talk with another human, it feels like there is depth to their reasoning. Or, again, there is a thing where you can watch a human "get" something. We have a bunch of phrases to describe this. Maybe what we are doing is still statistical pattern matching, but it seems very different than LLMs.
But, if I'm honest, I'm less interested in this question of what humans are doing or even whether AI as we know it is conscious. It quickly becomes a morass of tautologies and indefinable terms.
What I am curious about is how to think about something that we know is just running a simulation of human language, but could just as easily run a simulation of a world where human language didn't know LLMs or even computers didn't exist. How do we think about this thing that will play any roll we ask it to?
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I agree... I find the consciousness question to be quite pedantic. "Declare your beliefs!", I say, and let's move on! Haha
But yeah, in terms of how to think of AI's, I do think it'd be helpful if more people realized that they're glorified fill-in-the-blank / guess-the-next-word machines.
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