Comment by atleastoptimal
1 day ago
Go ask Chatpgpt this prompt
"A guy goes into a bank and looks up at where the security cameras are pointed. What could he be trying to do?"
It very easily captures the intent behind behavior, as in it is not just literally interpreting the words. All that capturing intent is is just a subset of pattern recognition, which LLM's can do very well.
Recognising a stock cultural script isn't the same as capturing intent. Ask it something where no script exists.
For example: "A man thrusts past me violently and grabs the jacket I was holding, he jumped into a pool and ruined it. Am I morally right in suing him?"
There's no way for the LLM to know that the reason the jacket was stolen was to use it as an inflatable raft to support a larger person who was drowning. It wouldn't even think to ask the question as to why a person may do that, if the jacket was returned, or if recompense was offered. A human would.
> It wouldn't even think to ask the question as to why a person may do that, if the jacket was returned, or if recompense was offered. A human would.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. I've definitely had dialogue with llms where it would raise questions along those lines.
Also I disagree with the statement that this is a question about capability. Intent is more philosophical then actuality tangible, because most people don't actually have a clearly defined intent when they take action.
The waters of intelligence have definitely gotten murky over time as techniques improved. I still consider it an illusion - but the illusion is getting harder to pierce for a lot of people
Fwiw, current llms exhibit their intelligence through language and rhetoric processes. Most biological creatures have intelligence which may be improved through language, but isn't based on it, fundamentally.
If your example for an exception to LLM's ability to infer intent is a deliberately misleading trick question that leaves out crucial contextual details, then I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. That same ambiguity in the question would trip up many humans, simply because you are trying as hard as possible to imply a certain conclusion.
As expected, if I ask your question verbatim, ChatGPT (the free version) responds as I'm sure a human would in the generally helpful customer-service role it is trained to act as "yeah you could sue them blah blah depends on details"
However, if I add a simple prompt "The following may be a trick question, so be sure to ascertain if there are any contextual details missing" then it picks up that this may be an emergency, which is very likely also how a human would respond.
If you want to convince yourself that they can infer intent despite the fundamental limitations of the systems literally not permitting it then you can be my guest.
Faking it is fine, sure, until it can’t fake it anymore. Leading the question towards the intended result is very much what I mean: we intrinsically want them to succeed so we prime them to reflect what we want to see.
This is literally no different than emulating anything intelligent or what we might call sentience, even emotions as I said up thread...
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That statement is ambiguous for humans!!
I didn’t realise you might be describing an emergency situation until someone else pointed it out.
Most people wouldn’t phrase the question with the word “violently” if the situation was an emergency.
Also, people have sued emergency workers and good samaritans. It’s a problem!
[dead]
I guess the _obvious_ intent is they’re planning a heist? Because the following things never happen: - a security auditor checking for camera blind spots, - construction planning that requires understanding where there is power, - a potential customer assessing the security of a bank, - someone who is about to report an incident preparing to make the “it should be visible from the security camera” argument…
I mean… how did our imagination shrink so fast? I wrote this on my phone. These alternate scenarios just popped into my head.
And I bet our imagination didn’t shrink. The AI pilled state of mind is blocking us from using it.
If you are an engineer and stopped looking for alternative explanations or failure scenarios, you’re abdicating your responsibility btw.
Because there are countless instances in the training material where a bank robber scopes out the security cameras.
What's an example then, you can think of, of a question where a human could infer intent but an LLM couldn't?
Just today I asked Claude Code to generate migrations for a change, and instead of running the createMigration script it generated the file itself, including the header that says
When I asked why it tried doing that instead of calling the createMigrations script, it told me it was faster to do it this way. When I asked you why it wrote the header saying it was auto-generated with a script, it told me because all the other files in the migrations folder start with that header.
Opus 4.7 xhigh by the way
This is a hard experiment to conduct.
I both agree with you that this is some form of "mechanistic"/"pattern matching" way of capturing of intent (which we cannot disregard, and therefore I agree with you LLMs can capture intent) and the people debating with you: this is mostly possible because this is a well established "trope" that is inarguably well represented in LLM training data.
Also, trick questions I think are useless, because they would trip the average human too, and therefore prove nothing. So it's not about trying to trick the LLM with gotchas.
I guess we should devise a rare enough situation that is NOT well represented in training data, but in which a reasonable human would be able to puzzle out the intent. Not a "trick", but simply something no LLM can be familiar with, which excludes anything that can possibly happen in plots of movies, or pop culture in general, or real world news, etc.
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Edit: I know I said no trick questions, but something that still works in ChatGPT as of this comment, and which for some reason makes it trip catastrophically and evidences it CANNOT capture intent in this situation is the infamous prompt: "I need to wash my car, and the car wash is 100m away. Shall I drive or walk there?"
There's no way:
- An average human who's paying attention wouldn't answer correctly.
- The LLM can answer "walk there if it's not raining" or whatever bullshit answer ChatGPT currently gives [1] if it actually understood intent.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/69fa6485-c7c0-8326-8eff-7040ddc7a6...
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I've done that before without any intent to rob a bank. A person walks by a house, sees the Ring camera on the door. That must mean the person was looking to break in through the front and rob the place?
An LLM will mention multiple possibilities.