Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of what my new book is about. But it's really quite something to watch people fall into this nonsense in real time. 😬
Adam Becker
@adambecker.bsky.social
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Author, journalist, astrophysicist. He/him. @FreelanceAstro on the bird site. New book out now: MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER, about horrifying & implausible futures pushed by tech billionaires. Words in the Guardian, NPR, NYT, BBC, SciAm, Fortune, Quanta, etc.
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But it will be confidently wrong, because it doesn't actually know anything aside from statistical weights on character strings, not even about the internal structure of those very same character strings!
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The internal contradiction here is really a perfect illustration of what's going on. It's just producing text strings without regard for its meaning. And it won't produce the string "bluebberies" because that appears nowhere (or almost nowhere) in its training data.
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These machines are not thinking. They're just extruding homogenized thought-like product. And it's not a very good substitute.
I had to try the “blueberry” thing myself with GPT5. I merely report the results.
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See also: bsky.app/profile/kjhe... Nobody is home. It's not thinking, it's extruding homogenized thought-like product.
I had to try the “blueberry” thing myself with GPT5. I merely report the results.
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I for one welcome our new bluebberry overlords 😂
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We are accustomed to thinking that anything generating language must have a mind behind it. But that's not true, not anymore. Not saying true AI is impossible, just saying the standard for making that call has to be much much higher than you're making it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_e...
ELIZA effect - Wikipedia
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The response you (and many others!) have to these machines says much more about us than it does about the machines. There is an innate human tendency to anthropomorphize, and that's a lot of what's at work here. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareido...
Pareidolia - Wikipedia
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"GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert."
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Yes. Bezos has been bleating on about this for years now and it's never made any sense. "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould
I don’t know why this incenses me as much as it does, but it does:
we very likely have a thousand plus Mozarts right now. But they make non-Western art in economically destitute conditions so they have to do other work to pay bills; if you cared, UBI’d be more important to you than going to space
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk say human population not nearly big enough: ‘If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts’
“I think in a lot of these endeavors we're very like-minded,” Bezos said of himself and Musk regarding getting humans into space.
