The Problem Here Isn’t That Large Language Models Hallucinate, Lie, Or Misrepresent The World In Some

The problem here isn’t that large language models hallucinate, lie, or misrepresent the world in some way. It’s that they are not designed to represent the world at all; instead, they are designed to convey convincing lines of text. So when they are provided with a database of some sort, they use this, in one way or another, to make their responses more convincing. But they are not in any real way attempting to convey or transmit the information in the database. As Chirag Shah and Emily Bender put it: “Nothing in the design of language models (whose training task is to predict words given context) is actually designed to handle arithmetic, temporal reasoning, etc. To the extent that they sometimes get the right answer to such questions is only because they happened to synthesize relevant strings out of what was in their training data. No reasoning is involved […] Similarly, language models are prone to making stuff up […] because they are not designed to express some underlying set of information in natural language; they are only manipulating the form of language” (Shah & Bender, 2022). These models aren’t designed to transmit information, so we shouldn’t be too surprised when their assertions turn out to be false.

ChatGPT is bullshit

Theory: Nobody who writes a physics textbook gives any fucks

Evidence:

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verdx

2 months ago

CNBC

Meta goes to arbitrator to prevent whistleblower from promoting tell-all book

An emergency arbitrator ruled that former Meta staffer Sarah Wynn-Williams is prohibited from promoting memoir of her tenure at the social m

Hey did you know there's a tell all book about the behind the scenes of Meta and the author is forbidden from promoting it?

The good news is however that it's already published and can't be stifled and whoever didn't sign the NDA can promote it as much as they want.

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verdx

10 months ago

i love this post so fucking much

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verdx

3 months ago

Just very recently started liking little birdies and looking them up and so and its made me so happy

Your quality of life will increase ten-fold when you learn to appreciate the sight of a little bird

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verdx

4 months ago

Have you read the new file? It's on nano. It's literally on vim. It's on less without editing. It's literally on Elvis. You can probably find it with grep. Dude it's on Arachnophilia. It's a Geany original. It's on sed. You can read it on sed. You can go to sed and read it. Log onto sed right now. Go to sed. Dive into sed. You can sed it. It's on sed. sed has it for you. sed has it for you.

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verdx

2 months ago