this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
859 points (96.5% liked)

Technology

59689 readers
3922 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Thousands of authors demand payment from AI companies for use of copyrighted works::Thousands of published authors are requesting payment from tech companies for the use of their copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence tools, marking the latest intellectual property critique to target AI development.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's just a really big autocomplete system. It has no thought, no reason, no sense of self or anything, really.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I guess I agree with some of that. It's mostly a matter of definition though. Yes, if you define those terms in such a way that AI cannot fulfill them, then AI will not have them (according to your definition).

But yes, we know the AI is not "thinking" or "scheming", because it just sits there doing nothing when it's not answering a question. We can see that no computation is happening. So no thought. Sense of self... probably not, depends on definition. Reason? Depends on your definition. Yes, we know they are not like humans, they are computers, but they are capable of many things which we thought only humans could do 6 months ago.

Since we can't agree on definitions I will simply avoid all those words and say that state-of-the-art LLMs can receive text and make free form, logical, and correct conclusions based upon that text at a level roughly equal to human ability. They are capable of combining ideas together that have never been combined by humans, but yet are satisfying to humans. They can invent things that never appeared in their training data, but yet make sense to humans. They are capable of quickly adapting to new data within their context, you can give them information about a programming language they've never encountered before (not in their training data), and they can make correct suggestions about that programming language.

I know you can find lots of anecdotes about LLMs / GPT doing dumb things, but most of those were GPT3 which is no longer state-of-the-art.