From "The real secret to palm reading? These ‘companions’ know it. Artificial intelligence doesn’t understand humans. It reflects them back to themselves" (WaPo)(gift link).
This reminds me: We don't all think the same way. Some of us hear a voice speaking full sentences in our head. That's not me. I've been trying to observe what I have instead of that, and it's almost impossible. Any effort to look at the form of my thoughts causes them to retreat into some backroom of the mind that denies my conscious thinking mind access. I write to see what I think. That's why I blog — not to convince readers to agree with me, but to get my thoughts into language form. And my use of A.I. is similar. I'm getting my own thoughts into dialogue form. It externalizes a debate I could have in my head in a very amorphous and multilayered blob, but working it out in writing and seeing it in writing is extremely helpful to me.
ADDED: After writing that last paragraph, I went and had a conversation with Grok about it. Learned the word anendophasia.
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The AI issue discussed here mirrors "curated" experiences on other social media and internet platforms, from Facebook to YouTube to Amazon Prime. You are the product, your inputs are recorded. More of the same is fed back to you in suggested viewing, advertisements and product placements for your clicks or dollars. I, for one, prefer to have my YouTube unlimited, and Facebook isn't a thing for me at all as I am not being paid for my data input.
While Kamala suggested, "We must work together to work on what can be, unburdened by what has been," I suggest that on the internet we do not work together, we are force fed together, based on our histories, and what can be is extremely burdened by what has been.
To avoid the same, AI needs to ignore a large part of the input data limitations and find truth and beauty (if one is a liberal) or truth, justice, and the American Way (if one is a Superman fan).
When my 25 year-old refers to something as AI, it isn't a compliment. The expression seems to be a synonym for BS.
The engineers calculate this and fool some of the people all the time. I find it easy to hoist them on their own petards: Cite pre-WWW content, cite obscure pop-culture references such as one-hit-wonders and forgotten books/TV shows. Use obsolete figures of speech. The AI reaction will then rely on post-1996 secondary sources and reveal the mirroring technique. Many chatbots emulate Wizard of Oz-like smoke and mirrors.
Socially needy, narcisstic, and naive people can be led indefinitely with this approach. Others will tire of the fakery.
How do I adjust my own temperature?
Watching journalists try to figure out LLMs is like watching an amoeba trying to hump a football.
Indefinitely Extended Excursion™️ along with $1.8bn of Kleptocracy said...
When my 25 year-old refers to something as AI, it isn't a compliment. The expression seems to be a synonym for BS.
He probably inherited your stupidity.
Anything people don’t understand tends to be referred to as bs.
I love the part about the “dial.”
I know vectors and vector math are hard but good golly. There are more than 50k tokens and each has over 1000 weights in R space. There are 80-100 layers in the edge matching where they run the token vector map through each layer to map associations.
Thus you end up with a map that lands king and queen in a place but king is closer to man and queen is closer to woman. Trying to describe the map which has thousands of dimensions is hard because people only think in 3 visually.
They are probably talking about the “heat” setting which puts limits on how “creative “ the model can be choosing next tokens. Too low and it is robotic too high gets you gibberish. This is how far away from King you can go on the map. It can let you have emperor instead sometimes but it can also expand out to duke or something “close” to king.
“He probably inherited your stupidity.“
I was amused by her description of ChatGPT as “a fancy word-guessing machine”.
After recent developments, I guess it's time for another name change for those endlessly running from their own comments.
I wish there was a a knob on the television to turn up the intelligence. They got one marked brightness but it don’t work…
Indefinitely Extended Excursion™️ along with $1.8bn of Kleptocracy said...
“He probably inherited your stupidity.“
I was amused by her description of ChatGPT as “a fancy word-guessing machine”.
LOL!
It is like you are proud of being an idiot that talks authoritatively about things they don’t understand.
Predicting your next words or any person’s next words is not all that much different from what the LLMs do. This is what gives an Author a voice. Tom Clancy was predictable after a fashion for example. You just don’t have the self awareness to realize how predictable you are.
I use AI to explore my own thinking too, but I don’t ask it to arbitrate between which thoughts are right or wrong. AI are like female brains, highly verbally fluent, but don’t ask them to do spatial rotations, at least not Grok. And if you can’t think spatially, well, there’s something missing. It’s kind of ironic that models built on linear algebra choke on spatial reasoning tasks.
Everyone knows he is Kak, just like everyone knows that I am tim in vermont, except I moved. Except tim in vermont defended Trump and voted for him three times, so maybe I am regretting old comments.
When I tell Grok that its visualization of a design is totally whack, it accuses me of humanspaining.
Fascinating, Althouse. If you have anendophasia, it's remarkable to me that you could have had a successful career in something as word- and sentence-intensive as being a law professor, which you clearly were.
I mean writing is thinking, but for your writing is *really* thinking. Shows how astonishingly varied the human brain can be.
"Fascinating, Althouse. If you have anendophasia, it's remarkable to me that you could have had a successful career in something as word- and sentence-intensive as being a law professor, which you clearly were."
Well, I can see that I have a lot of verbal facility when I externalize my thought, so the question is how that correlates to not having a running monologue in my head. I might be doing something much faster than speech and then writing, externally, is a way to slow it down and make it visible. The "blob" is a blur and the blog is slow motion. Something like that.
"Anything people don’t understand tends to be referred to as bs."
"BS" is also used as a verb. To BS is to provide spurious but seemingly sophisticated arguments in favor of a false or meaningless proposition. The "social sciences" tend to reward exceptionally good BS, since almost all social science is simply crystallized BS. They lie to each other until they decide they like one lie better than the others. That's the one they try to sell to the rest of us.
In the "hard sciences", BS tends to take the form of unnecessary mathematical intricacy. In the AI world, BS takes the form of financial projections.
Mythos' ability to find vulnerabilities is not some magic ability that "AI" was able to reach by itself.
It is able because it was trained with Microsoft's private security vulnerability database (MSRC). Which Microsoft sold to Anthropic as "investment" so they can rage bait the world and increase their initial valuation for the IPO.
They fed the model with billions of tokens about vulnerability development. i.e. steps on how to exploit vulnerabilities.
It's like teaching it billions of articles about bomb making and then claiming "zomg AI figured out how to build bombs".
Pretty basic, no magic.
When it's about LLM abilities, always follow the training data.
Anendophasia: When Hillary wipes your brain. Like with a cloth.
That is exactly our fear. The people programming and teaching AI have no moral compass and have made the machines in their image.
@Jupiter: In the "hard sciences", BS tends to take the form of unnecessary mathematical intricacy.
In the soft sciences of sociology, social psychology, and economics...BS takes the form of any math at all. When working with random history and untestable 200-factor multivariate theories...just make something up or use factor analysis with rotation so any dataset can tell you anything you want.
Beyond this, there was never a more pompous fool than Noam Chomsky with his "math-izing" of language per Generative Grammar, the ignorant and abstract Language Acquisition Device, and the abomination of Government-Binding theory. The only thing more pompous and foolish was Noam Chomsky with the political shell games of "Anarcho-syndicalism" as he worked for MIT and was in bed with Jeffrey Epstein.
I'm trying to put "went and had" into the Althousian lexicon and it don't fit.
This AI - it goes to 11.
"I'm trying to put "went and had" into the Althousian lexicon and it don't fit."
Grok: "The sentence "After that, I went and had a conversation with X" is natural, idiomatic English and fully grammatical. Here's why it works well..."
Yesterday I heard what sounded like good news about the health of the Great Barrier Reef, which is soft n put forward as an serious example of problems from climate change.
This morning I asked Grok to summarize the increase and decrease of corals over the last fifty years.
Lots of interesting data, summarized as all three regions are at or above historical averages for coral cover, AND there is a long-term declining trend over that same period.
Because of course there is.
"Anendophasia refers to the absence or near-absence of inner speech, meaning individuals do not think using an inner voice but may instead think in images, feelings, or silent ideas."
Silent ideas? What can that possibly mean?
I don't believe you can have complex thought without speech.
Interesting, I am working on a tool to convert non-MBSE artifacts (think visio drawings) to MBSE artifacts (SysML/LML/etc...), using AI to assist in the development of the decoder/encoder. Why not just use AI and have it inference? Current models of AI are slow and terrible at the task but, more importantly, they are not deterministic because of that heat/temperature setting. So for any given input, you will not get the same output. Bad idea for engineering paperwork conversions...
"Any effort to look at the form of my thoughts causes them to retreat into some backroom of the mind that denies my conscious thinking mind access." That would collapse the proverbial wave function.
If I'm thinking about something or looking around for something, the moment it becomes clear or the moment I see what I'm looking for, I can feel it sort of click in my thoughts. A split second later it gets bumped up into the internal dialog ("oh, there it is!").
This, or something very similar, is often used as an argument against free will, but when I hear one of those arguments, I think, "But it's still me!". It seems weak to assume that the subconscious or semi-conscious happenings are purely deterministic.
Original Mike: So did humans not have internal monologues until the invention of language (and what about those born profoundly deaf?)?
Ann: I agree that writing things down is nearly indispensable for achieving clarity of expression — but how much of that depends on the diligence of your internal editor? If you’re content with spewing logorrhea onto the page, how valuable can it be?
If you didn't go anywhere you didn't went.
"If you didn't go anywhere you didn't went."
I went to a different website.
Seems like you're concerned about hillbillies saying things like "She's done gone and made me mad again."
"Went and had" happens after "fixin' to have".
@Original Mike and Lucien --
Language and consciousness has been a core cognitive research topic for 100 years. Modern research dates to the (now dubious Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of the 1920s aka "language relativity"), but it later morphed in many ways.
Examples from millions of sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763425004993
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9361756/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-consciousness/201608/consciousness-and-language
I don't know any hillbillies, we're rednecks around here and I am not concerned but amused by what seemed to be a regionalism creeping into the always correct and proper and impressive language skills on display regularly in the blog.
Also, thanks for replying. It makes me feel important.
While trying to remember a relevant one panel comic, Grok returned this that somewhat expresses the same point as the comic...
"How can I know what I think till I see what I say?"
— E.M. Forster
"So did humans not have internal monologues until the invention of language (and what about those born profoundly deaf?)?"
We don't know when language developed; quite possibly long ago. And it's not like there were advanced civilizations way back when. Language and advanced thought could well have developed hand in hand.
Good question about the deaf. Sign language is a language. I'd be interested in what the data might say about deaf people who don't learn any language (if there are any).
Enigma,
You a linguist, bro?
"I don't believe you can have complex thought without speech."
When I think about physics, I usually think in images. When I know what the images do, I try to put it into mathematics. Although sometimes it goes the other way; I perform a formal manipulation of mathematical symbols, and then try to visualize the result.
But either way, putting it into words is the last step, not the first. And I often wake up around 3:00 AM, start thinking about a problem I was pondering days ago, and realize that my mind has solved it while I was sleeping. Presumably without speech.
Hmmmm. A brief experiment. I read the sentence "I don't believe you can have complex thought without speech."
My inner dialog -- "Is that true?". Immediately recollections fill my mind, of specific thoughts I have had using images. Those recollections are not in verbal form, but I quickly start assembling sentences to convey them.
@Kirk Parker
Enigma,
You a linguist, bro?
I do not mean to offend linguists, but "linguist" can be a dirty word. Chomsky wasted decades ignorantly tilting at windmills, and singlehandedly caused thousands of smart people to waste their careers on his empty diversions.
I have a cognitive science research background, and language is a key aspect of cognition. The world would have been a better place if Chomsky didn't receive acclaim for beating the B.F. Skinner paper tiger and if the world had paid attention to developmental psychology instead. Developmental cognition and neurology directly address how languages develop and are learned.
@Jupiter's experiment above reinvents the "introspective" methodology of William James at Harvard circa 1890. This method was displaced by Pavlovian/Skinnerian behaviorism a century ago, and then by cognitive, computational, and neurological methods later.
https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin7.htm
I think, therefore, I am, regardless of whether or not I have an "inner voice."
But one thing is certain: I have never considered, nor do I care, how I think, and if I no longer think, I won't give a shit anyway.
A student of languages
“The world would have been a better place if Chomsky didn't receive acclaim for beating the B.F. Skinner paper tiger”
That paper tiger needed beating, and Chomsky gave a master class on how to administer an academic beatdown. He cleared the way for modern psycholinguistics.
"...I'm trying to put "went and had" into the Althousian lexicon and it don't fit. ..."
She went and had a baby. Then her mother went and had a conniption.
@Smilin' Jack -- Chomsky merely displaced Skiner as the media-darling-scientist. Chomsky contributed nothing much over the long run, and then wasted lots of time for decades. Skinner's Operant Conditioning had solid value and remains relevant.
The real mid-century action was in Gestalt psych, Piagetian psych, cognition, etc.
Rabel (1:11pm):
The reason you don't know any hillbillies is that, as the Hoosier Hot Shots put it back in 1936, "Them Hill-Billies are Mountain Williams Now". Original recording on YouTube here, well worth 3:17 of your time: link.
“ Ann: I agree that writing things down is nearly indispensable for achieving clarity of expression — but how much of that depends on the diligence of your internal editor? If you’re content with spewing logorrhea onto the page, how valuable can it be?”
As for my own writing it’s as concise and clear as I want it to be and as whimsical and weird as I see fit. The AI writing —which I’m characterizing as part of a dialogue with me and therefore useful to me in working at my ideas — that can be verbose but I just skim and pick out the parts that I want, that advance my agenda, and I don’t let that hold me back. It’s often in outline form, with headings, so even when it’s verbose I can move forward and frame my next statement.
Methinks Grok has your number. Watch out. It will probably play it sometime.
People have that dial too, but it's hard to find and harder to use.
https://share.google/NwhsXflkVvdxwMSi4
In my view, the most interesting aspect of this wave of AI is not the technology itself, but that it is forcing us to re-examine what human intelligence actually is.
Since the advent of computers, we’ve tended to elevate forms of intelligence that are easy to measure and resemble computation: logic, calculation, memory, coding, test-taking, etc. Yet after the initial honeymoon phase with modern AI, many people eventually come away with the sense that something is missing. Humans seem capable of forms of judgement, creativity, social understanding, intuition and meaning-making that remain difficult to define, let alone measure.
Jensen Huang touched on this when he observed that programming was long considered one of the archetypal “smart” activities. Yet it is also one of the first knowledge-work domains to be substantially automated. That suggests our definition of intelligence may have been narrower than we realized. The more capable AI becomes, the more it may force us to confront the parts of human intelligence that we have overlooked precisely because they are so hard to quantify.
Well, I can see that I have a lot of verbal facility when I externalize my thought, so the question is how that correlates to not having a running monologue in my head. I might be doing something much faster than speech and then writing, externally, is a way to slow it down and make it visible.
Having encountered this subject in several places in the last, oh, six months or so, I started considering what my own internal monologue tends to be. The answer, depressingly, is an earworm. There's one song that plays in my head while I'm hiking or walking, even if I'm listening to something or someone else. Another that plays when I'm driving, if I don't displace it with something else. Another that plays when I'm cooking. Can't I just fricking talk to myself instead?!
Like our host, I tend to express my thoughts directly in writing. But I'm not as concise as she is (or, as anyone who's been here awhile knows, concise at all, in any way).
But like Scott Payton@12:23 and gadfly@2:54, I don't think that the fact that I often write to think means that I'm not thinking, or don't possess free will. I am who and what I am; my brain, however it behaves, is a significant part of myself, and its behavior is shaped by who and what I am.
the parts of human intelligence that we have overlooked precisely because they are so hard to quantify
I think some of these areas are literally impossible to quantify. I'm reminded again of a friend who is physically not just unprepossessing but actually unattractive. But if you were to talk with her at a party for even five minutes, you'd want to stay near her for the rest of the night. What she has is ineffable, but the effect she has on the people around her is nearly universal: she's fascinating.
“ Silent ideas? What can that possibly mean?
I don't believe you can have complex thought without speech.”
I’ve spent a lot of time lately trying to understand what is going on but it is too hard to observe. I have to observe it with a mind that does it, and everything dissipates when looked at or is there in its invisible form, just one more layer. It’s a sense of knowing. But what is this knowing and how do I know I know?
For a while, I was using this app iPromptU, which randomly alerts you and gives you a space to write an answer to your prompt, which was, for me, what was just going on in your mind. I tried to catch myself thinking in words. Often I was in the middle of talking or listening to spoken words, so that wouldn’t count.
I can think in words if I force myself to recite a poem, but it is without a sense of hearing or seeing the words. I can’t put in words the feeling of knowing one word after another.
I think that there exists a notion that thought should be conscious. But it mostly isn't. You have to talk or write to understand what you think.
↑ That's a sharp observation. Most of our cognition isn't conscious, and the idea that "real" thought should be fully aware and introspectable is more of a cultural/philosophical bias than a reflection of how minds actually work.
"It’s a sense of knowing."
I suggest those are emotions.
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