r/trueanon comment section defending "AI" (old.reddit.com)

submitted 1 day ago by trompete@hexbear.net to c/slop@hexbear.net

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The post itself is making fun of r/LeftistForAI, but then I veer into the comments and there's a lot of "AI would be good actually if weren't for capitalism."

First of all, people seem to be under the impression these so-called "AIs" can do a bunch of things they cannot do, which is really frustrating.

But my critique of the thing is so much more fundamental:

Anything worthwhile or interesting, whether it be written words, music, a game, whatever, is characterized by someone making an effort. Like they actually tried, they actually thought about it. They tried to look at the big picture as well as the details. Decisions were made about many things, should this be this way or that way? Things were tried, sometimes thrown out, sometimes kept. Someone went over it again and again.

Prompting a fucking LLM, or music generator or whatever, to just make a thing means that doesn't happen. Why would I engage with a thing that the "creator" didn't even bother engaging with?

Is nobody else feeling this way? They're all just missing the forest for the trees! WTF is going on?

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[-] trompete@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago

It actually does not learn from what it's seen before, or at least framing it as such is widely misleading.

These things are fed with ridiculously massive amounts of data during so-called "training", which adjust the weights (parameters) of the model. But that happens when they are created, all the parameters are set in stone afterwards, when the LLM is being used. During use, they do have a (limited in size) context window of tokens (words or rather parts of words, including the chat history) that influence their next output token.

If, for example, the LLM outputs something undesirable (aka "makes a mistake", which the thing has no concept of to begin with), and you chastise it about that, it is likely to promise you to not do that again (apologizing is part of its "training"), which is a false promise, since it cannot guarantee that. Since your complaint is now part of its context window, that may (or may not) actually help it avoid the mistake for a while. But if you reset the the context it will retain nothing, and even if you do not reset it, it will eventually "forget" about it, since it can only retain so many tokens in its context at any one time.