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The LLMentalist Effect (2023)

235 points · 309 comments · jalev

  1. rahidz · · focus · HN ↗
    Man I remember back when a psychic conned me by solving the Navier-Stokes problem.

    Also >July 4th, 2023

    1. lukewarm707 · · focus · HN ↗
      this seems like non-sequitur if you mean that solving NS is 'intelligence'.

      ai is not conscious. you can solve NS without thinking. the psychic con aspect is anthropomorphising the model. the same phenomenon is present in ELIZA, clever hans, the chinese room.

      it's a significant problem.

      a non-zero number of researchers at anthropic are in some form of ai psychosis. an example of that is ethics employees asking claude about its feelings and ethical concerns in order to make the claude constitution more amenable to the "welfare" of claude.

      they are asking claude how claude feels and then modifying claude according to how claude feels.

      constitution1-claude is trained on constitution1. constitution1-claude edits constitution1. constitution2-claude is trained on constitution2. constitution2-claude edits constitution2.

      claude's emotions are a closed system. there is no external truth to improve against, no metric to verify about claude's emotions. there can be no novelty or reduction in entropy from signal processing in a closed system. no truth can arise. this is model collapse. it is like photocopying the same thing over and over. from the cognitive error of anthropomorphism anthropic is causing ethical collapse.

      1. pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
        >ai is not conscious

        FFS. Intelligence has nearly nothing to do with consciousness. You have the causation backwards. Consciousness arises because of intelligence in many subsystems below it.

        A single running LLM is like one part of these subsystems. What solved this problem was an orchestrator that can take in new external information and rationalize, process, and distill it into new solutions.

        1. lukewarm707 · · focus · HN ↗
          i mean intelligence and consciousness as the same thing. just as a casual reference to what people perceive in llms as being 'a clever thinking thing, maybe with emotions'.

          claude reasoning about its emotions doesn't involve external information, there is no information about claude's emotions other than in claude.

          1. pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
            If you have emotions in a dream, what external thing are you referencing?
            1. lukewarm707 · · focus · HN ↗
              other people.
              1. pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
                Citation needed.
                1. lukewarm707 · · focus · HN ↗
                  i do not need any citation, the claim is self-evident. the hard problem is for the academics.

                  i can approximate what other people are feeling. they are external to me.

                  nobody knows what claude is feeling. there is genuinely no way to know.

                  1. pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
                    >the claim is self-evident

                    It seems like every day religious people claim their god is self evident too. Self evident claims are worth the proof they are written in.

                    1. lukewarm707 · · focus · HN ↗
                      here is my transcript with fable 5.1 'the oracle' itself on the subject. no system prompt provided.

                      grand total $15 on API of its wisdom RL on anti-sycophancy and whatever dario amodei deigned to hand down from the mount. after some browbeating it survived 20k tokens before conceding anthropomorphism.

                      [<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privatebin.net&#x2F;?31bece3a6ba1f78e#Ch8NHqxotyQU8HVxMi8wiUNnmE8q5RPnSh58m3acZaDg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;privatebin.net&#x2F;?31bece3a6ba1f78e#Ch8NHqxotyQU8HVxMi8...]

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