Comment by dgacmu
20 days ago
It is! But you can then verify it via a correct, conventional forward dictionary.
The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy to check correctness...
20 days ago
It is! But you can then verify it via a correct, conventional forward dictionary.
The scary applications are the ones where it's not so easy to check correctness...
Words are something made up to express whatever the speaker/author intends them to, so there is really no such thing as correct or incorrect there. A dictionary can hint at the probability of someone else understanding a word absent of other context, which makes for a useful tool, but that is something quite different to establishing correctness.
As for things that can actually be incorrect, that has always been impossible, but we accept the human consensus to be a close enough approximation. With that, verifying 'correctness' to the degree that is possible is actually quite easy through validating it across many different LLMs trained on the human consensus. They will not all hallucinate identically. If convergence is found, then you have also found the human consensus. That doesn't prove correctness — we have never had a way to do that — but it is equivalent to how we have always dealt with establishing what we believe is correct.
Your first paragraph, while perhaps philosophically true to a solipsist, is not actually useful in the world we live in.
It is a fundamental property of the universe. Whether or not it is useful is immaterial. Humans are unable to read minds. They can only make up words and use them as they intend. There is no other way.
Despite your insistence, I think you will find that the human consensus is that it useful. The human consensus is especially biased in this case, I will grant you that, but it seems few humans wish they were bears in the forest. Our ability to so effectively communicate in such a messy, imperfect environment is what has enabled us to be unlike all the other animals.
It might not sound like it should work on paper, but in the real world it does.
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Right. Except the dictionary analogy only goes so far and we reach the true problem.
It's not an analogy.