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appplicationtoday at 5:21 PM7 repliesview on HN

This is the root of AI psychosis. There’s a lot of unpack here, and I won’t go too deep because you can’t really have a discussion with affected folks because their fundamental basis is not evidence, it’s belief.

It is weirdly religious in a way, because if you were to present contrary evidence (e.g. experts in a field weighing in about how plausible sounding responses are bunk), you would only be told you don’t believe enough in the long term potential and capabilities.

Don’t get me wrong, I think we all agree capabilities will eventually improve (and farther-future capabilities could reasonably surpass experts), but really is unclear if the current transformer architectures with their probabilistic/hallucinatory outputs will plateau before they surpass current experts abilities in all promised fields.


Replies

cheschiretoday at 6:48 PM

I was a very early adopter in my circles with AI and I shared it with many people. Strangely, I seem to be the most skeptical about AI in my circles as well, but because I was the gateway for a many folks, they want to come back and share their experiences with me.

And it's so much like listening to someone in a church congregation sharing their experiences with god. Clear and obvious gaps are hand-waved away exactly how you're describing.

operatingthetantoday at 6:53 PM

>This is the root of AI psychosis. There’s a lot of unpack here, and I won’t go too deep because you can’t really have a discussion with affected folks because their fundamental basis is not evidence, it’s belief. Treating it as if it is an intelligence is the problem.

The problem is that AI psychosis is fundamentally the belief that an LLM is "thinking" at all. Outputs are just believable word vomit which resembles factual information.

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lazidetoday at 6:09 PM

I don’t think they will improve, there is too much incentive to poison the datasets going forward.

A lot of the models up to this point have been benefitted - like Google did - from essentially ‘pre SEO’ internet.

Now the same tools are being used to generate nigh infinite good sounding bullshit, which poisons the dataset in all sorts of hard to detect ways.

To add insult to injury, the human experts are also not as. Naive, and have many incentives to poison their own input in subtle ways too.

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perching_aixtoday at 8:47 PM

> There’s a lot of unpack here, and I won’t go too deep because you can’t really have a discussion with affected folks

Do you think it is any more possible to have a proper discussion with someone who preemptively paints the other person as mentally ill? Or someone who preemptively victimizes themselves?

Cause I don't think these are the hallmarks of an honest discussion. See also the entire past decade of political discourse.

Like, consider this:

> It is weirdly religious in a way, because if you were to present contrary evidence (e.g. experts in a field weighing in about how plausible sounding responses are bunk), you would only be told you don’t believe enough in the long term potential and capabilities.

A trivial counter to this is that you can just be an expert at something (e.g. your own work), use the damn thing yourself (professionally), and evaluate the outcomes for yourself. Then maybe remark "LLM good".

Now you come and remark "LLM bad", and point at random "evidence", either of outright other workloads, or even the one at hand: you're asking someone to reject the reality they've already experienced, entirely based on the assumption that they're "merely religious" or "in psychosis". You tell me if that's any more epistemically rigorous and sensible than their story.

sublineartoday at 6:32 PM

Human expertise is also improving all the time and not limited to just connecting dots. When AI seems to surpass a particular human, it's just because the human lacks broader knowledge and fails to investigate further.

An expert already knows they don't know everything. That was never the point. Critical thinking cannot be delegated to AI any more than it can be delegated to a book. There is nothing new going on here.

TomasBMtoday at 6:49 PM

Why is it psychosis and not lower standards?

While I can understand being skeptical of non-experts' claims that such answers are enough, I don't understand why you call it "psychosis" and not simply naivety or lack of expertise.

At the same time, the new so-called "models" haven't been pure transformer-based LLMs, but entire systems with tools (with access to the Internet), data storage, and the options to trigger additional instances for different tasks.

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