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I think that joke’s been around for a while, but there is the Terry Pratchett line about how if you had a button with a sign next to it saying “pressing this button will end the world, do not touch,” the ink wouldn’t even have time to dry.
I think that joke’s been around for a while, but there is the Terry Pratchett line about how if you had a button with a sign next to it saying “pressing this button will end the world, do not touch,” the ink wouldn’t even have time to dry.
If you ask an LLM to help you with a legal brief, it’ll come up with a bunch of stuff for you, and some of it might even be right. But it’ll very likely do things like make up a case that doesn’t exist, or misrepresent a real case, and as has happened multiple times now, if you submit that work to a judge without a real lawyer checking it first, you’re going to have a bad time.
There’s a reason LLMs make stuff up like that, and it’s because they have been very, very narrowly trained when compared to a human. The training process is almost entirely getting good at predicting what words follow what other words, but humans get that and so much more. Babies aren’t just associating the sounds they hear, they’re also associating the things they see, the things they feel, and the signals their body is sending them. Babies are highly motivated to learn and predict the behavior of the humans around them, and as they get older and more advanced, they get rewarded for creating accurate models of the mental state of others, mastering abstract concepts, and doing things like make art or sing songs. Their brains are many times bigger than even the biggest LLM, their initial state has been primed for success by millions of years of evolution, and the training set is every moment of human life.
LLMs aren’t nearly at that level. That’s not to say what they do isn’t impressive, because it really is. They can also synthesize unrelated concepts together in a stunningly human way, even things that they’ve never been trained on specifically. They’ve picked up a lot of surprising nuance just from the text they’ve been fed, and it’s convincing enough to think that something magical is going on. But ultimately, they’ve been optimized to predict words, and that’s what they’re good at, and although they’ve clearly developed some impressive skills to accomplish that task, it’s not even close to human level. They spit out a bunch of nonsense when what they should be saying is “I have no idea how to write a legal document, you need a lawyer for that”, but that would require them to have a sense of their own capabilities, a sense of what they know and why they know it and where it all came from, knowledge of the consequences of their actions and a desire to avoid causing harm, and they don’t have that. And how could they? Their training didn’t include any of that, it was mostly about words.
One of the reasons LLMs seem so impressive is that human words are a reflection of the rich inner life of the person you’re talking to. You say something to a person, and your ideas are broken down and manipulated in an abstract manner in their head, then turned back into words forming a response which they say back to you. LLMs are piggybacking off of that a bit, by getting good at mimicking language they are able to hide that their heads are relatively empty. Spitting out a statistically likely answer to the question “as an AI, do you want to take over the world?” is very different from considering the ideas, forming an opinion about them, and responding with that opinion. LLMs aren’t just doing statistics, but you don’t have to go too far down that spectrum before the answers start seeming thoughtful.
In its complaint, The New York Times alleges that because the AI tools have been trained on its content, they sometimes provide verbatim copies of sections of Times reports.
OpenAI said in its response Monday that so-called “regurgitation” is a “rare bug,” the occurrence of which it is working to reduce.
“We also expect our users to act responsibly; intentionally manipulating our models to regurgitate is not an appropriate use of our technology and is against our terms of use,” OpenAI said.
The tech company also accused The Times of “intentionally” manipulating ChatGPT or cherry-picking the copycat examples it detailed in its complaint.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/08/tech/openai-responds-new-york-times-copyright-lawsuit/index.html
The thing is, it doesn’t really matter if you have to “manipulate” ChatGPT into spitting out training material word-for-word, the fact that it’s possible at all is proof that, intentionally or not, that material has been encoded into the model itself. That might still be fair use, but it’s a lot weaker than the original argument, which was that nothing of the original material really remains after training, it’s all synthesized and blended with everything else to create something entirely new that doesn’t replicate the original.
How many do you think it is, and how much more acceptable is that number than this one?
“There was a particular bad guy near them” and “they all probably have bad opinions about Jews” are not sufficient justifications for indiscriminately bombing innocent people. What if there had been an Israeli leader at that rave? People in both refugee camps and at a music event should be able to exist without fear that they’ll die because they were near the wrong person. One seems to provoke a different reaction than the other for some reason though, and that might be worth thinking about.
When 66 to 72 million years old you reach, look as good you will not, hmm?
There is never going to be a case where the world misses the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything because it was said by a Nazi and everyone refused to listen to the Nazi. When it’s clearly straight up propaganda, it’s perfectly rational to dismiss it due to the source and not investigate further. If there’s a valid and useful point to be made, it’ll get made in more respectable sources too and then it might be time to pay attention. Plus, even if they do cite sources, it’s hard to spot where they’ve twisted or lied about those sources, but it’s really easy for the propagandist to spout whatever nonsense they believe because they don’t care about the truth. That asymmetry is good for the Nazi and bad for decent people, and the way to fix that is don’t waste your time carefully investigating and critiquing Nazi bullshit.
The phone slowdowns were intended to prolong the lives of phones, not shorten them. The underclocking only happened after your phone had been forced to shut down because the battery wasn’t delivering sufficient power. I had a phone with this problem, and opening the camera would sometimes just immediately shut down the phone instead. I got a free new battery for it, but the general fix was slowdowns instead. They should’ve disclosed it and they also should’ve given users control, but if they wanted people buying new phones, I know from experience that the random shutdowns were worse than a slower phone.
For a couple seasons, there was a private subreddit where they had extracted the official streams of every NFL game, and you could just open it in a web browser and watch in full quality for free with no ads other than what was in the actual broadcast. And for a while, there was a promotion in a few European countries for free NFL Sunday Ticket access, and if you started the stream over a VPN connection into one of those countries, you could turn the VPN off and it’d continue working. Then some online magazine published the trick and it stopped working the next week.
The reason the library isn’t open 24/7 is that it’s expensive to keep paying people to staff it for so many more hours, plus those are hours you’d have to pay even more because working at night sucks. The WiFi access point doesn’t have those issues. You can leave it on and help people for almost no money.
OPML files really aren’t much more than a list of the feeds you’re subscribed to. Individual posts or articles aren’t in there. I would expect that importing a second OPML file would just add more subscriptions, but it’d be up to the reader app to decide what it does.