I wish this article was just 3 paragraphs. The verbose writing style was a little tiring, I found myself scrolling impatiently to find what the actual "Lone Banana Problem" was.
AI might have problems with single bananas, but it can do that very well:
> In an experiment with the AI program Midjourney, the author found a peculiar issue: the program rendered images of monkeys holding bananas, but it consistently depicted two or more bananas even when asked to render a single banana.
The author suggests that the AI’s predilection for rendering multiple bananas might be due to biases in its training data or the lack of precise labeling. He points out that AI systems like Midjourney don’t understand objects in the human sense but rather recognize common patterns. These systems are only as good as the data fed to them and can inadvertently contain biases or incorrect representations.
The article further delves into existential questions about the nature of human intelligence, creativity, and morality compared to AI’s pattern recognition. It questions whether human cognition and morality are just advanced pattern matching with a better understanding of the physical world. The author also touches on the distinction between programming and prompt engineering, highlighting that the latter requires a more nuanced understanding of language and how AI models interpret it.
The author was trying to produce a single banana on a grey background.
The monkey was a later attempt at prompt engineering.
That AI summary is completely misleading.
Can't do better then brute force for verification.
Say it plain and simple. No one wants to read your train of thought.
"I believe that we are all the same person. How could anybody come to think that? In this paper I shall try to explain how it happened to me." [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233329805_One_Self_...]
The biggest communication problem is that you always need to take into account that your reader might be braindead trash. That has two consequences:
1. Unless you expose your full train of thought, expect screeches like "I dun unrurrstand, SPOONFEED ME BASIC REASONING, REEE".
2. Unless you explicitly say something, expect some assumer to claim that you said the opposite. Bonus points if this is due to failure to take context into account, or even notice that the context is missing.
Both consequences have been training writers to idiot-proof their texts with big walls of unnecessary words. And that's the case here.
My preferred format would probably be:
- answer to the title / synopsis
- the article, without ads, using the site’s style
They told me what the problem was in about 2 seconds, and frankly, the title and the first sentence alone were.
All right, I concede, a blind reader would not know, but most people are not blind.
The page is not long, the text is not complex. The message is obvious and it is contained in the title as shown here on HN.
The first pic and its caption make it plain.
The next group of 4 pics and their SINGLE SENTENCE caption spell it out clearly.
As for "almost the whole article" -- it is short! It took about 90sec to read the whole page, top to bottom.
"AI" chat bots can't count. This is well known. It is the stuff of memes.
Cool. The article has 2348 words, so that's around 26 words per second, or ~1560 words per minute.
According to some speed reading pages I randomly found via Google the consensus seems to be that 1000+ words per minute is quite exceptional. https://irisreading.com/what-is-the-average-reading-speed/ puts average adult reading speed at around 300 WPM, which you casually exceed by 400%.
Far be it from me to suggest that your estimate is inaccurate, but at least know that not everybody reads at that speed :-)
Points of comparison: I originally read Hal Clement's classic Mission of Gravity in about 25min, and Joseph Conrad's Victory in about 3 hours.
If the can't skim, for example if they are a foreign language speaker of low-intermediate ability (as I am in 5 or 6 languages, and I am also a professional language teacher among other things), then I expect them to know that they can't skim, and make appropriate allowances.
Yes, there were pictures that communicated the same thing, but people naively thought that those 2348 words may actually hold some additional information, as otherwise ca 2300 of them would be completely superfluous. But they were wrong; again, OP's point. Not sure what's so mystifying by this.
As I said, the title of the article and a couple of image captions are enough to get the gist, and as such, I find it baffling that so many people seem to have totally failed to understand it.
The point is, LLMs look smart but they are not, and an easily-verifiable data point is that they can't count.