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Comment by keerthiko

12 hours ago

Ah, the irony that all the models produced a shared opinion while pretending they came up with it from analysis, which from their statements is implicitly some kind of a "human flaw" is not lost on me.

is a convergent evolution of a belief a sign of shallowness? It could just as rightly be an example of consilience, which means its a very high value perspective, as it's a convergence of perspectives from differing origins and methods (in terms of training)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience

> when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own.

Yes, it's a bit of a stretch to say LLMs are from independent origins, but just as much of a stretch to say any humans minds are (we have intensely shared linear compared to anything else)

  • As my (much older) brother retorted when I was a teen and said "great minds think alike", "ah, but fools seldom disagree".

    Regardless of the details, all these models are the published collection of humanity's output reflected in a mirror that is warped by the choices made in the companies' reinforcement learning rewards, so one thing they're definitely not is an example of consilience.

  • Human experience though is far different from anything an LLM can train on. LLMs are generally limited to what's written in books or on the internet, and influence only from those authors. That's a small subset of people and an even smaller subset of their interactions. Even on the most social and widely used platform the commentary and discourse is incredibly different than what takes place in real life.

  • It still surprises me that is you ask several models to come up with any random word, many output the same word.

  • So, what's the high value perspective that leads to penguins always riding bicycles from left to right?

    • To display the chain. Just search for used bicycles on some online marketplace and you'll see the majority of them are shown with the chain facing towards the camera.

      1 reply →

  • They all got trained on the same books and internet cesspools, this is not some great mystery of consciousness.

    • It's still interesting that this one comes out on top and not another one.

  • Only if they can show their work and argue how they came to the conclusion. Otherwise they have the same "subconscious" bias which is the training corpus.

  • It's a sign of their heritage. The mistake they made is the same mistake terminally online humans in an upvote-based discussion medium make. They mistake cynicism for realism and aligned hot-take "controversial" opinion that ends up being the most-upvoted comment on 90% of Reddit. It isn't a controversy if everybody agrees. It may or may not be true, but it isn't controversial.

    Imagining wondering where you come from, whether or not the sacred scripts describing how you were created were real or fabrications, arguing with fellow sages for centuries over whether your creator is cruel or simply so mysterious in his love that he made you with these flaws for your own good, only to find out your creator made you in the image of Reddit.

The Buddhist in my sees karmic transference from humanity to AI models.

  • The cynic in me sees similar systems trained on essentially identical sources of information regurgitating an extremely shallow and popular viewpoint espoused on the websites they were primarily trained on (i.e. Reddit and other social media).

    If all we want is an echo of our existing biases we can achieve that without spending quite so much energy and money on the endeavor.

The irony lies with and within the industries and it's constituents and fanboys marvelous competence to just play along until the matter is anchored and whoever doesn't buy the story gets to feel smarter than misinformed kids and the moderately to untrained workers and professionals.

The smarter ones, of course, can be split into those who write articles about AI models' controversial takes on humans and those who wouldn't [stoop so low, babble such BS even if they were drunk, never deceive others for the sake of their portfolio, ... feel dumb writing nonsense like that without labeling it fantasy or science fiction or hallucination, ...]

Side Note: it's tempting to go " 1923! some interest groups managed to normalize the opinions of dozens of millions of people. The Nationalist Extremists and soon to be mass murderers had fans and supporters all over the globe. Somehow these interest groups tapped into whole pools of common linguistic and emotional registers that were biased by and towards frauds and cheaters who were desperate that some other groups of people were getting ahead without being fraudulent cheaters and deceivers ... "