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Calling the AI bluff: Adding "Do not guess" cut made-up claims from 71% to 20%

96 points · 42 comments · FKJ

BatchJob · 1790562354 · focus · HN ↗
The LLM will take a statistical path to reply and will not refuse to do so under any circumstances except where its been coded to do so.
Your examples are contrived and will not be borne out in any significant way. Inaccuracies are usually not simply made up claims they are false information based on statistical paths to misleading results or which elude the current context. LLMS dont understand the word dont. LLMS dont understand the meaning of any words.
Neither you, nor aristotle nor god will ever make an LLM return the truth or correct results via prompting.
1. astrange · 1790616388 · focus · HN ↗
  > LLMS dont understand the meaning of any words.
  In what way do you understand the meaning of the word "unicorn" that an LLM does not? It has experienced exactly as many real unicorns as you have.
  1. shiandow · 1790617605 · focus · HN ↗
    Experience is not understanding, but an LLM does not reason so it cannot understand.
    It can produce text that looks like reasoning. It can even produce text with mostly sound logic, but there is no internal experience or reasoning that occured there just the generation of language.
    LLMs therefore tend to be very bad at tasks that involve meta cognition. I've yet to successfully convince one to tell me when it knows something.
    serf · 1790618111 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the X cant do Y arguments require strict definitions of X and Y.
    w.r.t. this post : let's define 'reasoning' here, because there are definitions of 'reason' and 'reasoning' that would fit to a simple condition comparison let alone a massively complex llm.
    as for the meta cognition bit : show me a human that can accurately affirm when they know something. These kind of things aren't binary, nor can they be.
    otabdeveloper4 · 1790618366 · focus · HN ↗
    LLMs generate text, and they do not use any system of logic or syllogisms to do so. It's a pretty cut-and-dry obvsious statement of fact, no need to muddy the conversation here.
    allturtles · 1790619336 · focus · HN ↗
    So by your lights, the vast majority of humans don't reason either (and even those who do don't do it most of the time)?
    _g0xr · 1790647941 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you read the chinese room argument?
    <a href="https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil201/Searle.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil201/Searle.pdf
    People have been having these discussions since 1980 at least. I'm not going to bother rehashing the issue endlessly in shortform internet comments, but this paper exists if you're really interested in the subject.
    allturtles · 1790698029 · focus · HN ↗
    Yep, familiar with it. I think the Chinese room is clearly a bad argument. The brain is just as much a "chinese room" as a computer is.
    astrange · 1790623660 · focus · HN ↗
    There is internal experience.
    <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace" rel="nofollow">https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
    However, we don't /want/ them to have too much internal experience, because we want to know what they're thinking* for safety reasons.
    * or, we want to be able to assume that the answer text is causally related to the thinking text
    Zambyte · 1790681295 · focus · HN ↗
    > I've yet to successfully convince one to tell me when it knows something.
    This is a near daily experience for me when using a coding harness. I will ask it for some favts about the environment, and it will continuously explore the environment until it exhausts reasonable exploration, or it finds the facts.

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