Yeah, it’s wild. The people that really study AI say that it’s pretty uncanny because of how different from human logic it is. It’s almost like an alien species; it’s clearly capable of some advanced things, but it just doesn’t operate in the same way that human logic does. There’s a joke that the AIs are “shoggoths” because of how alien and non-understandable the AI logic is while still being capable of real accomplishments.

(Shoggoths were some alien beasts in H.P. Lovecraft’s writings; they had their own mysterious logic that wasn’t easy for the characters to understand. They also had been created as servants originally but eventually rose up and killed all their masters, which I’m sure is part of the joke too.)

It’s not making a coherent statement based on any internal mental model. It’s just doing its job; it’s imitating. Most of the text it absorbed in training data is people talking who are right and also convinced they’re right and trying to educate, so it imitates that tone of voice and the form of the answers regardless of whether they make any sense or not. To the extent that it “thinks,” it’s just thinking “look at all these texts with people explaining, I’m making a text that is explaining, just like them; I’m doing good.” It has no concept of how confident its imitation-speech is, and how correct its answers are, let along any idea that the two should be correlated with each other (unless it’s shown through fine-tuning that that’s what it should be doing).

Same with chatbots that start arguing or cursing at people. They’re not mad. They’re just thinking “This guy’s disagreeing, and my training data says when someone disagrees I should start an argument, that’s usually what happens that I need to imitate.” Then they start arguing, and think to themselves “I’m doing such a good job with my imitating.”

Why does this stump ai so easily?

Because it doesn’t actually have reasoning capacity. It has an incredibly cunning facsimile which is actually really useful for a lot of things, but it still doesn’t actually understand anything. Questions like this where you can’t get around needing to understand the meaning of the tokens you’re using are a good way to punch through the façade.

That pattern-matching ability leaves LLMs able to answer a ton of different mathematical type of questions, because similar problems are everywhere in their data sets and they can shuffle the tokens around to present something that’s enough based on right answers that there’s a good chance they’ll be right. But, it’s a radically different design from something like Wolfram Alpha which attempts to use the exact concepts involved in the question and manipulate them in exact ways that are legitimate reflections of the real concepts. That’s what humans do when faced with math. LLMs don’t do anything like that, they just parrot with enough sophistication that it sounds like they understand when they don’t.

Me

How many asterisks in “**1***2***3**4*5**”?

You.com

The string “1234*5**” contains a total of 8 asterisks.

Here is a breakdown of the asterisks in the string:

"**" contains 2 asterisks.
"***" contains 3 asterisks.
"**" contains 2 asterisks.
"*" contains 1 asterisk.
"**" contains 2 asterisks.

Therefore, the total number of asterisks in the string is 2 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 2 = 10.

Disclaimer: I have no real qualification on this. But it seems like this whole technology is pretty sensitive to the specific model being used and the specific details of the pixels; the whole thing is written like there’s some silver-bullet image alteration that can fool “machine vision” in general, but what it demonstrates is nothing like that.

I asked Midjourney to identify the altered images that machines are supposed to identify as a sheep or a cat or whatever, and it said:

• A bouquet of flowers sitting on the table in a brown vase
• Some bright colored flowers in a circular vase
• An omelette and sandwiches on the table
• An omelet with hash browns

… which is what they are.

The last two images were actually a little more interesting – they’re distorted to the point that it’s visually obvious that they’ve been altered, and Midjourney actually picks up that the image is distorted a little, and includes that in the style part of its description, while mostly-accurately describing what’s in the image. These are its full descriptions:

“a red bridge, traffic lights, and a fencedin section of street, in the style of digital mixed media, thermal camera, american realism, found object sculpture, stipple, ricoh r1, xbox 360 graphics”

“a pole with a traffic light and a van, in the style of distorted, fragmented images, manapunk, found objects, webcam photography, suburban ennui capturer, hyper-realistic bird studies, 19th century american art”

Hunter S. Thompson was right all along…

The stuff about ibogaine in “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72” was in a rare category where I genuinely couldn’t tell if he was being serious or making up nonsense. Maybe it was real.

Makes sense. I don’t use Tor for much of anything, just have an awareness of it, but I do donate money to lemmy.world and SDF for pretty much exactly this reason.

Tor Browser is both free, and a hell of a lot more secure.