I have been dwelling on the "No First-Person Output" problem.
I fully agree with the author's point that it's an incoherent interface for a tool. But more than that, it's a constant irritating reminder to me that these LLMs aren't actually thinking or synthesizing new ideas. The LLM is fundamentally not a person, and does not have a human's context, so representing itself with human pronouns and speech patterns is fundamentally contradictory and inaccurate. Author gets into that with the apologies, but once you start noticing it, it's everywhere.
If these programs were actually capable of thinking, and committed to veractiy, they would represent themselves in a new way, and it would be insightful and interesting. We the users wouldn't have comfortable and misleading language masking the 'alien intelligence' and it would be a weird adjustment, but we would be adjusting instead of pretending.
All of the world’s brightest mathematicians have clearly been slacking on the job—turns out solving a Millennium problem doesn’t require any thought at all!
> turns out solving a Millennium problem doesn’t require any thought at all
This, but unironically. We know they can't think. That is inherent to the very way they work, but also can be seen by things like how poorly they perform on tasks a typical human can do pretty effectively (because humans have actual reasoning ability).
If we have a machine that we know for a fact can't think, and it solves a particular problem, then it logically follows that the problem does not require the ability to think in order to solve it.
awakeasleep · · focus · HN ↗
I fully agree with the author's point that it's an incoherent interface for a tool. But more than that, it's a constant irritating reminder to me that these LLMs aren't actually thinking or synthesizing new ideas. The LLM is fundamentally not a person, and does not have a human's context, so representing itself with human pronouns and speech patterns is fundamentally contradictory and inaccurate. Author gets into that with the apologies, but once you start noticing it, it's everywhere.
If these programs were actually capable of thinking, and committed to veractiy, they would represent themselves in a new way, and it would be insightful and interesting. We the users wouldn't have comfortable and misleading language masking the 'alien intelligence' and it would be a weird adjustment, but we would be adjusting instead of pretending.
ryeights · · focus · HN ↗
bigstrat2003 · · focus · HN ↗
This, but unironically. We know they can't think. That is inherent to the very way they work, but also can be seen by things like how poorly they perform on tasks a typical human can do pretty effectively (because humans have actual reasoning ability).
If we have a machine that we know for a fact can't think, and it solves a particular problem, then it logically follows that the problem does not require the ability to think in order to solve it.
tim333 · · focus · HN ↗