this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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This is what I find the most amusing about the criticism of LLMs and many other AI systems aswell. People often talk about them as if they're somehow uniquely flawed, while in reality what they're doing isn't that different from what humans do aswell. The biggest difference is that when a human hallucinates it's often obvious but when chatGPT does that it's harder to spot.
This is… really not true at all.
LLMs differ from humans in a very very important way when it comes to language: we know the meanings of the words we use. LLMs do not “know” things, are unconcerned with “meanings”, and thus cannot be said to be “using” words in any meaningful way.
Uh, but we don't? Not really. People use the wrong words all the time and each person's definition (i.e., encoding) is slightly different. We mimic phrases and structures we've heard to sound smarter and forge on with uncertain statements because frequently they go unchallenged or simply aren't important.
We're more structurally complex than a LLM, but we fool ourselves in thinking we're somehow uniquely thoughtful and reliable.