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David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)'s posts Post Back to profile
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jarkman

@david_chisnall I'm not so sure. I often express myself in natural language to ask people to do things, and that usually works out pretty well.

So it's possible in principle, it's just not something that computers can do yet. Maybe one day they will.

1 January at 12:15 | Wall-to-wall | Open on chaos.social
7 comments
Russell S. Pfau

@jarkman When I ask people to do things in natural language, it often fails miserably (the people do the wrong thing). You must be interacting with very capable people or your natural language is very precise and unambiguous.

1 January at 12:46 | Open on ecoevo.social
Steve Hersey

@rspfau @jarkman
Or, third option, you and your audience share sufficient context to resolve the ambiguities or at least make the right interpretation easy to infer.

This is a feature that no LLM is ever likely to possess, as that would require its training set to mirror your own experience and training, and also requires the kind of generalized, informed judgement that humans routinely do but LLMs purely suck at. Statistical next-word prediction is no substitute for a mental model of actual meaning.

That LLMs routinely produce utterly confident, wrong results is one of their core dangers. Humans at least know (mostly) to say, "I'm really not sure about this," before speculating.

@rspfau @jarkman
Or, third option, you and your audience share sufficient context to resolve the ambiguities or at least make the right interpretation easy to infer.

This is a feature that no LLM is ever likely to possess, as that would require its training set to mirror your own experience and training, and also requires the kind of generalized, informed judgement that humans routinely do but LLMs purely suck at. Statistical next-word prediction is no substitute for a mental model of actual meaning.

1 January at 14:03 | Open on tilde.zone
jarkman

@n1xnx @rspfau Sure, LLMs are terrible at many things right now. Maybe they'll never get better, maybe future machines will come to learn the world more richly and deeply.

1 January at 14:08 | Open on chaos.social
Steve Hersey

@jarkman @rspfau
I'm sure they *will* get better, but absent some quantum leap in computational and storage capabilities, and some truly horrendous amounts of energy input, I don't think they can ever become good enough to be trustworthy. (Just enough to be a real-world example of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.")

1 January at 14:14 | Open on tilde.zone
Wolf480pl

@jarkman @david_chisnall
Because people actually do have a synchronized model of how other humans' brains works, and those who know you have a model that matches your particular brain. I think it's called "mirror neurons".

1 January at 16:09 | Open on mstdn.io
David

@jarkman @david_chisnall

You can only ask them to do one of a few different things. Imagine actually picking randomly from the space of commands. Humans expect and know to perform only a few items from a very restricted set of possible things to do.

1 January at 17:16 | Open on fediscience.org
Alexandre Oliva
my experience, shared with many neurodivergents, is that neurotypicals and even other neurodivergents very often misunderstand us, and vice-versa, and the misunderstandings are occasionally very hard to recover from, becoming another source of discrimination against minorities. AFAICT minds that work in one way build thoughts in ways that don't carry over very well to minds that work in other ways, especially when there isn't awareness of and tolerance for the differences. I've known people who can understand and "translate" expressions of thoughts in ways that enable people with different mind structures to communicate more effectively. it's an amazing skill. I wonder if LLMs extend the experience of facing frequent misunderstandings to a majority of the people, or if they could help people translate between different mind structures, different perceptions of context, and avoiding triggers
my experience, shared with many neurodivergents, is that neurotypicals and even other neurodivergents very often misunderstand us, and vice-versa, and the misunderstandings are occasionally very hard to recover from, becoming another source of discrimination against minorities. AFAICT minds that work in one way build thoughts in ways that don't carry over very well to minds that work in other ways, especially when there isn't awareness of and tolerance for the differences. I've known people who can...
2 January at 7:59 | Open on gnusocial.jp
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