The constant mental vigilance in a generative world is exhausting.

"I asked Claude to do $thing and it did this!"

No it didn't. No you didn't. Probably none of that happened.

And somehow, being unwilling to admit the thing is just making stuff up is annoying and unnecessary, not the damn model.

@mttaggart

I can't get people to understand that the "hallucination" problem is unsolvable because "hallucination" is how it works. That's all it does. Next tokens based on the whole previous series of tokens that represent "the conversation" being had between prompts and responses combined with the hidden prompts that give the thing its flavor. The fact that it is "right" isn't part of it. That's why they never say, "I don't know". They don't know anything. They are literally making it up every single time. It's why they are so expensive and why they are ruining the environment. There is no recall, no memory, no "knowing". As I've seen it said elsewhere, "there is no 'there' there". It's worse than the Chinese Room thought experiment because at least that produces correct responses. This creates the illusion of a correct response. We are killing the earth and building an inescapable surveillance state around technology that will never get any better than it is right now.

@jrdepriest The one that gets me is the "reasoning" models. They're just making up more text to fluff the context! No thought is happening, nor can it! It's maddening.

@mttaggart @jrdepriest it's just working backwards to "explain" it's bullshit answer, or so I heard.

if so that's a straight up con.

@dannotdaniel @jrdepriest Two different things.

"Reasoning" models literally talk to themselves to build out context for prompts. This leads to incredibly high token usage, and also some truly insane, neurotic-looking behavior as the model talks itself into corners.

But yes, if you ask a model "why" it did or said anything, you'll just get nonsense. There's no introspection happening there at all. Researchers can't pinpoint how some of these inferences are made, but the model itself can?

@mttaggart @jrdepriest all right well that's at least what they advertise I guess

I was impressed with the "reasoning" when they rolled it out but I've barely used it, and I've definitely encountered the situation where the thing just doesn't shut up