AI is like starting from the cake and working back to confirm the eggs, the milk, and the flour.
that analogy does not make any sense.
I mentioned information acquisition and thinking are typically not separate processes, but if we act as if they are hypothetically: The cake is the final synthesis of your various information combined with the thought to understand them. LLMs give you output that may look like cake - it follows grammar, structure, and mimics thought. The output is also always a statistically correlative combination of various sources in petabytes of training data - Wikipedia, some random Reddit comment, a conspiracy website, a doctor’s blog.
When you get that LLM’s “cake,” you can decide to eat it, and also decide if it tastes right. You can pick it apart and look at the structure a bit. But it takes a lot of effort to confirm what went into it after it’s baked. You may be able to taste when it’s made with rat poison, but some poisons taste like food. Was it made with sugar syrup or ethylene glycol? An LLM is just looking at probabilities and associations, and is limited by training data which you (and even the LLM company) cannot typically even reliably trace - those citations it gives you often do not even contain the propositions they’re cited for.
Starting from reliable sources in the beginning is akin to starting with sugar, flour, milk. You’ve verified them, and now you know the cake is cake.
The output is also always a statistically correlative combination of various sources in petabytes
so is first page of google search.
again. you gather information (with whatever tool you prefer) and then you verify them (with whatever tool you prefer).
if you go through both steps thoroughly, it really doesn’t matter much what is your preferred tool.
and again - if the alternative to this would be just watching fox news, then any attempt to gather some independent information is progress. baby steps.
Yes, but the sources are there and you can limit to credible sources before you look. You pick reliable ingredients and you make a reliable cake. Starting with a cake, provenance unknown, and trying to see if its origins match your standards, is slower.
and again - if the alternative to this would be just watching fox news, then any attempt to gather some independent information is progress. baby steps.
Yeah, at least this I’ll agree with (for now). Fox News is intentional disinformation, LLMs are accidental disinformation. I’d rather the latter.
But obviously that changes based on the LLM, version, and training data. LLMs have intentional and unintentional biases (like searching for Tianenmen Square massacre information on a Chinese LLM, and now those biases exist even in US LLMs based on QWEN).
And even now, they are extremely susceptible to suggestion. For example, if a Fox-brained voter says, “What are the reasons I should vote for Ken Paxton and why is Talarico a communist?” that will be a very different outcome than “Who should I vote for in Texas?”
I mentioned information acquisition and thinking are typically not separate processes, but if we act as if they are hypothetically: The cake is the final synthesis of your various information combined with the thought to understand them. LLMs give you output that may look like cake - it follows grammar, structure, and mimics thought. The output is also always a statistically correlative combination of various sources in petabytes of training data - Wikipedia, some random Reddit comment, a conspiracy website, a doctor’s blog.
When you get that LLM’s “cake,” you can decide to eat it, and also decide if it tastes right. You can pick it apart and look at the structure a bit. But it takes a lot of effort to confirm what went into it after it’s baked. You may be able to taste when it’s made with rat poison, but some poisons taste like food. Was it made with sugar syrup or ethylene glycol? An LLM is just looking at probabilities and associations, and is limited by training data which you (and even the LLM company) cannot typically even reliably trace - those citations it gives you often do not even contain the propositions they’re cited for.
Starting from reliable sources in the beginning is akin to starting with sugar, flour, milk. You’ve verified them, and now you know the cake is cake.
so is first page of google search.
again. you gather information (with whatever tool you prefer) and then you verify them (with whatever tool you prefer). if you go through both steps thoroughly, it really doesn’t matter much what is your preferred tool.
and again - if the alternative to this would be just watching fox news, then any attempt to gather some independent information is progress. baby steps.
Yes, but the sources are there and you can limit to credible sources before you look. You pick reliable ingredients and you make a reliable cake. Starting with a cake, provenance unknown, and trying to see if its origins match your standards, is slower.
Yeah, at least this I’ll agree with (for now). Fox News is intentional disinformation, LLMs are accidental disinformation. I’d rather the latter.
But obviously that changes based on the LLM, version, and training data. LLMs have intentional and unintentional biases (like searching for Tianenmen Square massacre information on a Chinese LLM, and now those biases exist even in US LLMs based on QWEN).
And even now, they are extremely susceptible to suggestion. For example, if a Fox-brained voter says, “What are the reasons I should vote for Ken Paxton and why is Talarico a communist?” that will be a very different outcome than “Who should I vote for in Texas?”