James ThomsonMay 26

Could we maybe stop talking about LLMs like they are becoming sentient? Amongst other stolen data, they have been trained on a whole bunch of text from science fiction stories about computers becoming sentient, and statistically know how to write that kind of thing.

You're not creating Skynet here, it's just seen The Terminator a hundred times and is quoting your favourite lines at you.

Show threadFediThing 🏳️‍🌈May 26
@jamesthomson It's pretty telling that the makers of LLMs "warn" us about them while selling them, they are trying to plant the idea that LLMs are sentient so people would try to use them to replace workers.
Show threadJayMay 26
@FediThing @jamesthomson What’s very funny in the “this has some terrifying implications about your conception of humanity” kind of funny is when they tout how lifelike/amenable their LLM is and it’s the most chirpingly moronic dicksucker you’ve ever seen and you realize why these people simply cannot make or appreciate art.
Show threadLord Caramac the Clueless, KSCMay 26
@WhiteCatTamer @FediThing @jamesthomson Systems don't need to be sentient to be dangerous. As soon as we create autonomous agents that can use any kind of software on a computer like a human does and connect them to the Internet, they can cause all kinds of trouble. They don't need to be self-aware, they don't need to understand what they are doing. You give them some kind of goal or directive, something you'd like them to do, and then they'll just do all kinds of crazy shit because the machine created some weird narrative from the prompt and does whatever fits the narrative.
Show threadHuh, that's weird.May 27
@LordCaramac @jamesthomson So just like malware on about any existing operating system without all the marketing horse sh*t.
Show threadLord Caramac the Clueless, KSC
@noworkie @jamesthomson Well, these models are more unpredictable, and they are capable of quite intelligent behaviour, just not near as intelligent as the snake oil salesmen would have us believe. It is like an upside down intelligence where the upper levels of cognition somehow exist, but there is no foundation of emitions and instincts underneath, no sense of being part of this universe and interacting with it. And actually, the kind of capabilities that we humans usually think of as signs of high intelligence often turn out to be quite easy to recreate with computers, like playing chess, solving equations, painting pictures or writing text. However, many of the things that any animal, like any mouse or even any beetle, can do easily are still hard to do with machines. We can do those things as well, of course, but we usually don't think of them as "intelligence" due to the common belief in human supremacy.
May 27 at 3:04pmWeb
Show threadHuh, that's weird.May 27

@LordCaramac @jamesthomson I have absolutely no idea as to what this run on paragraph intends to convey.

Remarkably I do believe the aforementioned ‘prose’ can surprisingly serve a dual purpose; either to poison an LLM or identify an LLM generating a whole lot of kack.