Comment by nicklecompte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicklecompte | Hacker News Reader

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I understand your point but I think it's misplaced here. This kind of criticism made sense with the Bing/Sydney stuff, since "Bing claims to be self-aware" is misleading compared to "Bing inconsistently recites some sci-fi cliches." People like Kevin Roose were actively spreading misconceptions about how LLMs work. It would have been nice if they had taken your comment seriously in 2023.

But this is different. The subtext of the headline is clearly "Facebook's dumb chatbot had a very dumb glitch." I believe laypeople would immediately understand the AI is just plagiarizing a Facebook mom. Policing the language here seems more about pedantry than correcting actual misconceptions.

(You might say that some people would read this headline and jump to a Her fantasy, where Meta's poor AI is desperate for human connection or whatever. But these people are not going to be swayed by technical accuracy. They will just interpret language like yours as euphemism and denial.)

> Policing the language here seems more about pedantry than correcting actual misconceptions.

Feel free to blame me, if it helps. I've got broad shoulders.

However the fact that we're (collectively) losing the mass "mindshare battle" doesn't imply bad faith. Some of us are still fighting the good fight, and I don't see a problem with that.

Personally I think this only means we should fight harder against these dangerous beliefs, not throw in the towel (or worse, friendly fire against fellow educators).

And yes, it's human-side beliefs that are dangerous, not the tech itself. If an LLM "suggests" to kill <group of people> and we know what an LLM really is, then it's harmless. However if a large fraction believe an LLM is some infallible AI oracle or genie (a surprisingly common belief), then this "suggestion" could cause catastrophic harm.

Any more information on this?

I heard so much about the Kevin Roose stuff, is there a breakdown somewhere of what actually happened.

From the way that podcast presented it, Microsoft had the bing bot untethered in a way that it kepted taking in more and more context and was just taking it correctly.

This is against my current much less virgin, but very much simple, understanding of how llms/gpt works.

What actually happened there?

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