this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
88 points (100.0% liked)
SneerClub
1011 readers
1 users here now
Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Control the language and you control the thought. I pitched a fit when "hallucinate" was put forward by the tech giants to describe their LLMs' falsehoods, and it mostly fell on deaf ears in my circles. Hallucinating isn't what these things do. They bullshit.
Hallucination also hid that literally everything they produce is a 'hallucination' because that's how they work. "Bullshit" is much more apt, as a bullshitter is sometimes and even often right.
The use of anthropomorphic language to describe LLMs is infuriating. I don't even think bullshit is a good term, because among other things it implies intent or agency. Maybe the LLM produces something that you could call bullshit, but to bulshit is a human thing and I'd argue that only reason that what the LLM is producing can be called bullshit is because there's a person involved in the process.
Probably better to think about it in terms of lossy compression. Even if that's not quite right, it's less inaccurate and it doesn't obfuscate difference between what the person brings to the table and what the LLM is actually doing.
“confabulate” is, imo, the closest we have (i don't remember who originally used this analogy, unfortunately)
@mawhrin To misuse an old engineering joke, is an LLM a Turbo Confabulator?