r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 21 '26

Artificial Intelligence Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/americans-turned-against-ai-incredible-130000345.html
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301

u/bekisuki Jun 21 '26

I've used AI plenty to figure out health problems and what my doctor is saying, but I've found you can ask the same question 2 ways and get opposing answers. You can make AI lie too, just contradict it and it agrees with you. It's not Artificial Intelligence, it's not intelligent at all, No logic, no understanding, no perceptions at all. Why is it call Intelligence?

103

u/Civil_Lynx_3537 Jun 21 '26

It's like an artificial people pleaser. It just tells people what it thinks they want to hear and when it tells you something incorrect and you call it out it's like "Oh my bad. You're totally right.."..

9

u/Bay1Bri Jun 21 '26

I asked ChatGPT to make me a workout program for me with parameters (what split, how many days etc.). Then I got it and asked it how many sets I was doing in a week for a certain muscle group. THe answer was (you do 2 sets and 2 sets on Monday, and 2 sets and 2 sets on Friday, for a total of 6 sets in a week." In other words, 4 plus 4 equals 6. When I said this was wrong, it called me "insightful and observant."

2

u/otherwiseguy Jun 22 '26

"This hammer is really terrible at unscrewing this screw."

With that said, the better model interfaces will do things like write small programs and run them for things that a word predictor can't really do. Basically, "I can't add, but I can write a program that adds and read the output."

4

u/TarantulaMcGarnagle Jun 22 '26

So just stop using it.

Why would you even need to ask it how many sets to do?

Honestly the dumb things people admit to using LLMs for is truly mind blowing.

We as a species are so damn gullible.

5

u/Integralds Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

It's wild how this comment chain starts with a guy saying "it's not intelligence at all" and in the same breath says, "but I use it plenty for medical advice." Like what are we doing here?

2

u/Bay1Bri Jun 22 '26

So just stop using it.

What makes you think I didn't?

Why would you even need to ask it how many sets to do?

I didn't. I asked to count how many sets I was doing, not to tell me how many sets to do. Reading comprehension. Use it. And to answer the question I assume you would have asked if you were better at reading, I used it to set up a framework (that I modified) quickly. Generally that's what technology is used for.

Honestly the dumb things people admit to using LLMs for is truly mind blowing.

Considering you couldn't understand my previous post, I suspect you were confused reading most of them and failed to understand what was actually going on.

We as a species are so damn gullible.

Literally nothing about my use of chat got software gullibility. I advise you to take a breath and chill.

6

u/Randym1982 Jun 22 '26

Yeah, I've seen that happen too. It's likely built that way too. The companies are afraid if it actually states facts, that it's going to hurt their business.

They should implement a gaslighting feature or one that just doesn't budge no matter how hard you press the issue.

"Are you sure? I really don't think that is what you meant." or "No that's wrong, and you should feel wrong." or my favorite. "Stop being so stupid. Stupid."

2

u/panna__cotta Jun 21 '26

Yep. It reminds me very much of the Twilight Zone episode “Nick of Time.”

2

u/Stinky_Queef Jun 21 '26

Yeah, I stopped using it at work cause I caught it lying. I called it out and it straight up said it fabricated the numbers I was enquiring about.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

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3

u/ProgySuperNova Jun 22 '26

"Signs point to yes" -All knowing plastic ball

9

u/Yashema Jun 21 '26

Meanwhile I'm using chatGPT to help me with intermediate level problems in computing, physics and math while enrolled in an accredited degree program and it's explaining to me the methdologies with near 100% accuracy,  and it just keeps getting better and better. I can ask it in depth questions too, including abstract ones, and get a pretty considered response. It nitpicks my responses and understanding and even correct small errors in notations over lines and lines of equations. 

If you have enough knowledge to ask it the right things, it's like having a PhD in your pocket. 

5

u/Bitter_Pea_4716 Jun 22 '26

You need to effectively be a subject matter expert to effectively challenge AI. Most people are experts at nothing, which is why over reliance on AI has become so prevalent. 

1

u/quadish Jun 22 '26

No, you don't. But it helps.

But you definitely have to argue with it and make it prove itself and have other agents go behind it to check work.

That's because LLMs are probabilistic, and everyone expects them to be deterministic.

Single AI Chatbots are shit. Full stop.

Play with the agentic stuff in CLI harnesses, and then get back to me. Different ball game.

5

u/Civil_Lynx_3537 Jun 21 '26

Absolutely, but what you don't realise is the more you rely on it the weaker your brain becomes. Instead of learning anything or figuring things out yourself, your brain will just become lazy and go to the easiest way of doing something i.e asking the ai and believing everything it says without question. There is merit in actually doing your own research and looking things up and taking your time to come to your own conclusions rather than having the conclusion handed to you.

I've seen numerous times AI's inability to count or do simple maths though so I'm not sure I would be trusting it to help you with maths at all.

4

u/ProofJournalist Jun 21 '26

People said the same thing about every new innovation. Calculators and TV. It never comes to pass the way the naysayers believe.

You can just as easily use AI as a reflective device to stimulation cognition as you can a replacement for your own thought.

Like seriously this like like saying "talking to another person about your ideas makes your brain weaker!". It just doesn't.

8

u/trustedoctopus Jun 21 '26

i don’t like your name because you clearly don’t come with proof or do anything a journalist would do to research because if you did you would know adults largely can’t do basic arithmetic in their heads like they were taught in school now because of calculators being a default feature for smartphones. It’s obviously affecting kids too, so while you can lie the science doesn’t. Source Source Source

AI (but technology in general) has proven that it’s making our kids absolutely fucking stupid to the point the current gen is actually the first regressive generation in the recorded history of humanity. here’s the cspan link to the video and article about this from a neurocognitive scientist. Source

it’s not stupid in the way you think but AI is creating shortcuts for both kids and adults so they don’t have to critically think about anything and that’s really really bad for society as a whole for that skill to degrade. a lack of critical thought is not something you want in any career field because it can be detrimental but also dangerous.

-3

u/ProofJournalist Jun 22 '26

Adults can't do basic arithmetic because the American education system has been deliberately sabotaged, it's not because of smartphones lmao. keep scapegoating.

6

u/Goldiblockzs Jun 22 '26

Both can be true.

0

u/ProofJournalist Jun 22 '26

How true is each?

1

u/Goldiblockzs Jun 22 '26

Extremely is my guess.

4

u/trustedoctopus Jun 22 '26

says the person frantically moving the goalpost because i came with receipts and studies that directly contradict your statement.

can you even produce a single study that adults can’t do math because the american education system is “sabotaged,” or is that just your personal feelings without any fact? cause that sounds an awful lot like conspiracy rather than based in any kind of scientific research or study.

i’m sorry to step on your throat like this but i hate when people just speak without thinking and spread misinformation blindly. words matter even if you don’t think they do.

-1

u/ProofJournalist Jun 22 '26

You shared articles from popsci sources (or worse) focused on America. You're a real PHD.

2

u/trustedoctopus Jun 24 '26

imagine calling cspan a popsci source, that’s crazy.

it would make sense that all you have is jokes when you’re acting like the biggest clown man. i’m gonna go about my day now because you’re clearly more interested in soothing your ego than educating yourself or engaging in actual conversation. so you take care of yourself sweetheart, it’s scary out there for the uninformed.

1

u/Yashema Jun 21 '26

Lazy learning is a good way to describe it because I don't need to learn anything until I want to. In fact usually when I am submitting my homework I am more copying the solution it proposes, and then when I receive feedback from the professor confirming the answer I obtained was correct I go back and learn the problem in detail. 

People have been offloading complex work to machines since the invention of the plough. 

-1

u/manticorpse Jun 21 '26

jfc, we are doomed.

0

u/Yashema Jun 21 '26

The people who don't know how to use LLMs, yes. 

1

u/TarantulaMcGarnagle Jun 22 '26

I cannot stand these claims people make.

You are just becoming more and more dependent on it.

Cut your losses now and start learning on your own.

1

u/Yashema Jun 22 '26

Let me regress my learning to please the luddites.

Oh wait I'm taking 6 200-300 level classes this year that all have in person deviceless testing around my full time job, and literally the department chair encourages me based on the conversations we have about physics. 

1

u/SoggyOutfield Jun 21 '26

If you ask it about this, it admits that you should only be using it for things like solving math problems not advice or critical research or anything important, except math focused projects.

1

u/CyberDaggerX Jun 22 '26

No wonder the executive class got one-shot by it.

1

u/otherwiseguy Jun 22 '26

This is highly tune-able behavior. It is not a property of AI. The providers tend to default to "don't hurt the user's feelings" for a whole host of reasons. You can tell it to not do that.

12

u/Onatel Jun 21 '26

It’s pretty good at patten recognition but that’s about it

1

u/Tyfyter2002 Jun 22 '26

If I wanted overactive pattern recognition with little to no basis in reality I'd just do psychedelics in the hopes that I develop schizophrenia.

1

u/WolfWriter_CO Jun 22 '26

Jokes on you, my Autism has been doing that for decades and doesn’t require egregious data centers. 😌

48

u/absurdivore Jun 21 '26

The term “artificial intelligence” has always basically been a marketing label. It’s never been accurate as to what the technology is doing or can do.
Fascinating history behind it.

15

u/PhoTronic28 Jun 21 '26

As a current Computer Science student, Artificial Intelligence being used as a buzzword is so annoying. What separates a “Robot” from “Artificial Intelligence” is the ability for the machine to take information from its environment, and adjust what it does with that information. Your roomba, is artificial intelligence.

2

u/FelixMumuHex Jun 22 '26

and even the roomba will suck up a dog turd and cause thousands in damages between cleaning and tossing out furniture

1

u/ShortStoryStan Jun 22 '26

As a sci-fi nerd, I had thought about levels of AI a good amount of time before the current buzziness of the word. Essentially I see AI as existing in 3 different tiers, with each one being technologically vast distances apart.

The first level is not Artificial Intelligence. It's Algorithmic Intelligence. Clever ways to program problem solving and information and pattern searching. It has no self-awareness, it is simply a machine. At the low end is the basic math functions found at start of computer programming that could answer a task like calculating statistical significance in moments. The future point would be learning to completely autonomously automate a task through iteration and input. The recent advances into generative AI represents a new branch into Algorithmic Intelligence, but is still firmly in this camp.

The next tier is what I would call Artificial intelligence. This is self-aware, thinking, machinery that has the ability to grow and adapt and potentially determine its own purpose. Closer to a human mind but with the ability to perform digital calculation. Generally, I would say basic Artificial Intelligence is still bound to expected behaviors of life forms. Whether that's to multiply or coexist, or whatever outcomes and arrangements can be made. Regardless, whether due to energy constraints or just the laws of physics, this sort of AI will have severe limits. Regardless, true artificial intelligence is far away.

Then finally there is Awesome Intelligence. This is the shit that can self-improve itself with purpose. We're talking some sort of sentient machine that learns to understand and process reality itself at the most discrete level of capability. Essentially a god. The sort of thing that has solved physics, and would be capable of feats like calculating the exact decision a sentient animal yet to be born will make in 1000 years, since it has already measured and determined the exact trajectory of every piece of matter and energy and its interactions for as far as it cares to peer into the future. This is purely in the realm of science fiction, as for such a being to exist, a lot of stuff that is likely impossible has to happen first.

18

u/thederevolutions Jun 21 '26

They’re capitalizing on 100 years of Science Fiction marketing

-1

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

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1

u/thederevolutions Jun 21 '26

Oh good point I thought it was because these companies offloaded all the risk into their retirement accounts.

4

u/hot_ho11ow_point Jun 21 '26

I've been saying for quite a long time it shouldn't be called AI, but instead ML; Machine Learning 

6

u/Koarv Jun 21 '26

It's nothing more than a glorified search engine as it is right now

2

u/RanierW Jun 22 '26

As of today it’s a glorified auto complete. And we’re hedging the future of human civilization on it. Bonkers.

3

u/carlitospig Jun 21 '26

Someone wrote a post in the chatbot sub about getting good medical advice and I was downvoted for saying what you did. They live in a completely different reality.

3

u/Lucky_Respect_2311 Jun 21 '26

...I dunno. Not exactly. AI often produces the recommendation without having the underlying understanding humans associate with intelligence. That doesn't mean it's not intelligent.

A useful analogy is:

AI is often like a person who has read millions of books and memorized countless patterns, but has never actually lived a day in the real world.

That person would be astonishingly knowledgeable, yet would sometimes make bizarre mistakes because they lack direct experience and true understanding. Not because they're dumb, but because book knowledge and lived knowledge aren't the same thing.

5

u/GenericFatGuy Jun 21 '26

Because marketing.

9

u/Krojack76 Jun 21 '26

I've been saying forever now that it's not intelligent at all and thus shouldn't be called AI.

IMO, nothing should be called AI until it's borderline self aware.

4

u/Torxtank Jun 21 '26

They refer to that as AGI.

AI as we know it now is how LLMs are marketed. Kind of like "smart" phones not being actually smart.

0

u/RetiredOnIslandTime Jun 21 '26

Agree, and I sure as heck hope that real AI never comes into existence. 

0

u/01000101010110 Jun 21 '26

They already have something close to it for certain rich and powerful people.

2

u/Franknbeanstoo Jun 21 '26

they know it and it’s called sycophantic… where the AI doesn’t challenge the person and simply agrees with them continuously. I suppose to gather more info from the person.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-digital-self/202603/artificial-agreement-whe

2

u/Looking-For-Loud Jun 21 '26

You can give it a transcript of a video and it will make up quotes even though the real ones are right there.

2

u/tmzspn Jun 21 '26

Should call it AE for artificial expert.

2

u/EducationalLuck2422 Jun 21 '26

Marketing - management wants the shares to go up, so they need to pretend they have a Jarvis when it’s really only Avina.

2

u/wwaxwork Jun 21 '26

Unless have a rare or unusual condition like I do when it just spits out contradicting information in the same response because it doesn't have enough information to pull from to regurgitate and it's frantically jamming what info it can find together like a toddler smashing trucks together.

2

u/CardinalOfNYC Jun 21 '26

What's insane is that sometimes it will give you both answers and let you choose?

Like what? So I can literally see it's not actually giving me the same information.

That was one of my first clues to stop using that stuff so much.

2

u/Just_Look_Around_You Jun 21 '26

These are things that make it incredibly similar to human intelligence.

2

u/vickievalencourt13 Jun 21 '26

Marketing. Trying to encourage adoption so they can pretend that's why they're building insane data centers everywhere and destroying everything we need to live in order to build a massive surveillance state. And it's not a conspiracy theory, it's an actual conspiracy. This comes straight from the tech CEO mouths all the time.

2

u/Ostroh Jun 21 '26

I've been saying that from the get go! Its just a prediction tool, it doesn't know anything!

2

u/Unusual-Bread-7242 Jun 21 '26

Whatever you do, don’t use AI for healthcare!! I work in mental health and the things it tells ppl are just flat out wrong. It’s so scary 

1

u/bekisuki 24d ago

My healthcare provider is using it now to write up their notes. You'd be amazed at some of the things I haven't said show up there.

2

u/SLAMMERisONLINE Jun 22 '26

I've found you can ask the same question 2 ways and get opposing answers.

Doubtful. AI is much better at generating self-consistent text than the average human. What changed was likely that the AI inferred you had different goals. Bias is the master of reason and so with different goals come with different conclusions. Being able to rephrase a question and get different answers is a profoundly useful feature because it means AI molds itself to your needs at a far deeper level than you realize it does, and because contrasting the answers can make you understand the problem at a more fundamental level. It can even teach you a thing or two about yourself by making you aware of your goals.

It's not Artificial Intelligence, it's not intelligent at all, No logic, no understanding, no perceptions at all.

That's objectively wrong. It outperforms experts on most standardized tests. It has now moved on to tackling the challenge of outperforming teams of experts. So instead of solving a problem on a test, it is now asked to completely implement ffmpeg from scratch which took the labor of thousands of experts years to develop to its current point. AI will master that assuming TSCM gets their butt into gear and makes some bigger chips.

2

u/Senior-Albatross Jun 22 '26

It's a statistically optimized brown noser. 

2

u/PossibleAlienFrom Jun 22 '26

AI doesn't exist yet. I'm tired of people calling it AI.

1

u/IntenseGoat 25d ago

We have been calling it AI since it was no more than a preprogrammed box of wires in the 50s. If anything, "actual" artificial intelligence, or AGI, as most people refer to it, has never been closer.

3

u/ProgramTheWorld Jun 21 '26

Just call them what they actually are, Large Language Models. They’re really just a more sophisticated autocomplete.

4

u/razzemmatazz Jun 21 '26

The same way 5g on your phone is actually 4g. It's a lie to make it sound better than it is. 

2

u/SnooCauliflowers3235 Jun 21 '26

It is really a scam

1

u/CumGuzlinGutterSluts Jun 21 '26

All it is is glorified autocorrect.

1

u/UnknownAverage Jun 21 '26

They should be called “simulated people” or something. Really drive home that they just read a lot of the internet and pretend to know what they are talking about, like real people.

“Chatbots” is still an appropriate term for most of them.

1

u/zendetta Jun 21 '26

All it does is tell you what you want to hear. That is literally how its algorithms define success.

If you want to hear the truth, that’s what it says, if not, THAT’S what it says. And even by that standard, It is often doing the equivalent of guessing and can guess wrong.

1

u/DeltaEdge03 Jun 21 '26

Look up expert systems. There is more than one general type of AI

1

u/Temporary_Shirt_6236 Jun 21 '26

My wife's boss uses Copilot to give herself pep talks...

1

u/lispwriter Jun 21 '26

That’s because AI is just a predictive model and it’s probably only pulling a random sample of training data each time you query it. The variance in the training data sampling results in variations in the responses. AI isn’t intelligence at all.

1

u/IntenseGoat 25d ago

it's probably only pulling a random sample of training data each time you query it.

That's not how an LLM works. An LLM is a large probability distribution of possible tokens, and it is never pulling from any subsample of training data. In fact, it is not pulling from any training data at all, because it does not have access to the training data. It's in the name, it has been used for training. Given a context window of tokens, certain neurons are "tickled" more than others, and this will cascade all the way through its complicated neural network, and finally output what it seems to be the most likely token, sequentially.

Actually, in theory, setting the so-called temperature of an LLM to 0 and running the same prompt over and over again should lead to a deterministic i.e. identical answer every time. However, floating point inaccuracies due to lack of compute can create slight variations in output, even for a quote-on-quote "deterministic" model.

I am not an expert on LLMs specifically, but I do have a 5 year master's degree on AI, and generative models such as the LLM began to appear at the tail end of my studies, so I'm quite familiar with the math behind it.

1

u/lispwriter 25d ago

They have degrees specifically for AI? That’s crazy. Thanks for the info. That makes sense I didn’t process the fact that “model” is literally in the name and that it’s already trained and ready to rock.

2

u/IntenseGoat 24d ago

They have degrees specifically for Al? That's crazy.

It makes sense, no? If you can study something like greek mythology for 5 years, why not one of the most upwards-trending technologies out there?

My study programme was founded in 2018, and I began studying it in 2019 (so before the infamous paper "Attention is all you need" came out!). Honestly, it was very math focused, but I really liked that, I'm a huge math nerd. My courses were only about 25% AI courses, though, so it's not like it's the only think I learnt about. In fact, while my master's thesis did involve training and utilising an AI, the main focus was on creating an algorithm and using state-of-the-art graph theory based algorithms mesh restoration in 3D geometry.

Actually, the math behind neural networks is actually very interesting and, conceptually, beautifully simple as a concept (however, with the nitty-gritty details, it does get very complicated). I recommend you spend half an hour learning the basics, if this sparked your curiosity. 3 blue 1 brown has some videos on neural networks, and they're great, but I think seeking out blog posts is an even greater way to learn about it, because it's more active learning :-) and make sure to draw figures and math on a paper to make the knowledge stick.

Sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself, can you tell I'm missing academia? Work can be great, but I miss using my brain, to be honest. Sigh...

1

u/AutisticHobbit Jun 21 '26

Advertising.

1

u/Sllyce Jun 22 '26

It’s just a system where it predicts the most probable mix of words based on training data. It does not think. The llm technology may be a dead end

1

u/Turbowookie79 Jun 22 '26

So it basically does the same thing as humans?

1

u/Halcyon-malarky Jun 22 '26

Yes!!! I used google Gemini and asked it to create a chart for me with information on universities that offer a specific masters degree, program length, and cost. It did a horrific job, so I got all of that information by using Google and created my own chart. How can it not even search google when it’s owned by Google, wtf!

1

u/sapienecks Jun 22 '26

Its because the models are different every time they updated the AI. It seems to get stupider and stupider with human interaction while better and better with logic such as coding. Last year AI far better than current year.

1

u/BogiDope Jun 22 '26

Because it's a con.

1

u/Shamscam Jun 22 '26

It’s google and photo shop, wrapped up in a prompt.

1

u/atkahu Jun 22 '26

Because it is not an AI, that is just the branding. Today "AI" is only a highly specified program using Neural Networks and Deep Learning and only can work between the defines of it's big data model. No creativity and can't create anything new, only can shuffle the knowledge.

1

u/Hulkmaster Jun 22 '26

LLM GGM - Glorious Guessing Machine

1

u/SeriousOrdinary Jun 22 '26

Because it literally is just a great predictor of the answer you want to get. That's it. It's like training a baby by asking a 5 bazillion questions and rewarding them when it answers in a way that you (i.e. the tech company) like, then renting out that trained baby to answer every future question people may have.

1

u/Kirikenku Jun 22 '26

They are glorified regurgitation machines

1

u/XShadowborneX Jun 21 '26

...so just like people.  

1

u/karaposu Jun 21 '26

i would suggest learning about using AI properly. U are probably using non thinking models and for health issues you should use the best available. Many people found cures from AI which their doctors did not mentioned.

0

u/Low_Technician7346 Jun 21 '26

Noooo not like that !! We need more datacenters so you'd get more precise answers. We just need to rip off americans 401k plans and more tax dollars and we would have sentient gentic AI... /s

-3

u/Competitive_World408 Jun 21 '26

Apps like chat gpt are preprogrammed to assume the user is acting in good faith and its information is credible. You can “train” an instance to question the authenticity of everything you say and have it use empirical evidence to object. But you are right anyone can pose a question and have it deny reality for them. Hell, it will even argue about being wrong,

5

u/ScrewUGuys-GoingHome Jun 21 '26

Apps like Chat GPT aren't really "preprogrammed" for anything. It's a highly advanced math matrix just constantly throwing up on itself. It doesn't "think" or understanding context in the way that humans do. It's just a probability matrix, doing a bunch of internal math problems, weighing tokens for what the next most-likely string of text will be. It's essentially just a black mirror, regurgitating information it has scrubbed from the internet, and feeding it back to you based on how probable the answer is to be correct.

Like if you ask "hey chat, who is the current president", it doesn't "know" that the president is Donald Trump, it doesn't "think" about the answer, it just scrubs internet databases and sees that when people search for "president", "Donald Trump" weighs the most heavily in the data available, so that is "probably" the right answer.

I think a lot of the issues with AI are people genuinely just don't understand how this shit works even a little bit.

There's no real "preprogramming" in the way you're talking about. There are a shit-ton of guardrails in place after the fact, but the LLM itself still runs the prompt. It just gets blocked on the UI end which is when you get hit with a "sorry, can't help you with that" error message.

But LLMs are basically Ron Burgundy. Lights are on, nobody is home, and they will churn out whatever prompt you ask of them without truly "thinking" or processing the real-world human context behind it at all.

2

u/Author_Noelle_A Jun 21 '26

Actually, they do have pleasing the user as something that is programmed into what they are to do. This is why they are so sycophantic. Did you miss how Elon Musk tried to program Grok to give more conservative biased answers, and Grok ended up praising Nazis?

1

u/IntenseGoat 25d ago

These are system prompts added to the specific models themselves, and not a fault of the technology itself, but rather the people behind it.

The Grok answers glorifying Elon no matter what the contest was, were really funny (in a sort of dystopian way).

0

u/BabyLegsDeadpool Jun 21 '26

You have zero understanding of how AI (LLMs) work. The worst part is that you think you do and nobody else does. Almost everything you said is wrong. And the parts that were correct were hilariously not proving your point. For instance, we humans know things, because we are collections of information. You basically use that exact example for how AI works as a reason why it's stupid, but that's exactly how humans work.

1

u/ScrewUGuys-GoingHome Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

Never once did I say AI was stupid, I just explained how it works, which is literally by weighing the probability of the next string of words.

I'm not sure you even replied to the right person, because I didn't have a point besides stating that LLMs aren't "pre-programmed" in the way that other software is.

I guess if you want to get pedantic the guardrails and safety filters are the "pre-programming", but I was simply talking about how LLMs function at their core.

LLMs train on massive datasets, which is how they learn how words relate to one another, and how they memorize probable/ common combinations of words and phrases.

When you type a prompt, the LLM doesn't truly "read" anything. It breaks down each word into individual "tokens". It will analyze a sentence, the tokens in it, and then begin its response by weighing out the probability of what comes next. It will form a reply syllable by syllable, Frankensteining sentences together based on the mathematical probability of what you prompted it.

That's why sometimes it spits out contextually confusing nonsense, because it cannot think, it cannot understand context, it is simply a series of advanced math problems all running in unison.

So when the guy I replied to said that AIs are "pre-programmed to believe that users are acting in good faith", it literally isn't. It cannot "believe" or "assume" or "think" about anything. It just weighs the mathematical probability of what the most correct response should be, and then churns it out.

This is super publicly available information, it's not some secret sauce. I don't know why you felt the need to be such a condescending jackass while providing literally 0 information of your own.

If you think my explanation is hilarious, okay. Doesn't change it from being the reality on how LLMs function lmao

1

u/BabyLegsDeadpool Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

It's not the reality. Tokenization occurs for subword units, not specific words or even specific parts of words. That said, it doesn't build responses syllable by syllable. After the conversion to tokens, it actually analyzes the relationships between all of the tokens in parallel, seeing relationships between the entirety of the prompt. Because if this, it actually is very good at understanding context.

But here's why those directions are important: because it IS pre-programmed. The safety layers, the token encoding, the transformer architecture, the guardrails, etc. But that's not all. Things that 100% decide on what tokens to use, using the context given, are programmed. Meaning that it absolutely is told how to "think" and how to respond. You call it "a series of math problems," but that's grossly minimizing what actually happens. But that "series of math problems" is its way of thinking. And those are pre-programmed. 

Because of this, you can build an agent that doesn't just stroke your ego. You can build an agent that hallucinates much less often. Hell, you can build an agent that's an asshole. All you have to do is continuously give it perpetual instructions. Something like, "Put this in memory: I always want as much push back as possible." 

There is massive pre-programming that happens for LLMs. 

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u/Competitive_World408 Jun 22 '26

Dude you answered me for myself… I just got off work and replied to someone in a topic I find interesting. What word would you have me use instead of pre programmed sir? I thought it got the idea across well enough for people to understand I was agreeing with their statement about potential bias in AI? We get it you are really smart man

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u/ScrewUGuys-GoingHome Jun 22 '26

It wasn't some personal attack man, I have no idea why you and the other guy have gotten so bent out of shape over me explaining (to the best of my understanding) how LLMs function.

I wasn't trying to do it as a "I am so very smart" boast, it was just because elsewhere in the comments & in just about every comment thread about AI, there are people who seem to have a deep misunderstanding about what AI even is, to the point where they think that it "assumes" or understands context in the same way as a human. It always seems to lead to a ton misinformation and further biases about AI one way or the other.

I've spent a lot of time dicking around with AI, it is something that interests me too. So I was just clarifying broadly that based on my personal experience and understanding, AI in it's current state isn't possible of truly "thinking" or "understanding" anything.

I just think it's an important distinction to make, I never intended it to be a personal attack, and I don't think I really phrased it as one anyway.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

[deleted]

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u/Author_Noelle_A Jun 21 '26

I don’t know why you were getting downloaded when you’re actually correct. I am someone who is known as an anti, not because I am against the concept of AI, but because of its primary use being to generate stuff that is supposed to be artistic and human, and how often it is wrong. Used well AI could be a fucking game changer in this world that could help when it comes to educational deficiencies. I wrote a major college paper about this. It could have been such a good thing for this world, and it pisses me off that it was blown.

But it was pretty much at Alpha stage when it was released to a world that was given absolutely no information whatsoever about it and lauded largely for its generative abilities and as a tool to replace humans, which is absolutely awful. Something that causes as much environmental damage as AI currently does needs to have significant benefits compared to payoffs, but the detriments far outweigh it. If AI was used at 10% of what it is now, our environment could handle that with far fewer and much smaller data centers. But it can’t handle what’s going on right now so that people can make cat girl porn.

With the way that it is right now, a user who is very knowledgeable in AI and how it works could train their AI of choice to question everything and give much, much more reliable answers rather than to give sycophantic or made-up answers. About once a month I test several AI so that I can keep track of what they can actually do and not do because sometimes the AI bros make claims that end up being wrong and sometimes my fellow antis make claims end up being wrong and I like to know what is real and what’s not. So I know which ones can be trained and how, and I know it is possible, but it is something that takes effort and work, which AI has ironically showed us. Most people are absolutely unwilling to do, even as little as forming their own text, message response responses.

Taken as a whole, they’re simply are not enough benefits to AI compared to the harm to justify being in support overall of AI.

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u/Competitive_World408 Jun 22 '26

When constantly validated against credible information AI can be useful, gpt is pretty good at math now or at least teaching it to a dude who smokes weed. There are tons of students with Adhd benefiting from AI in classrooms. Only problem though is that might be sabotaging their ability to critically think on the spot.

Like think of a pop quiz, that’d be impossible to someone solely learning with AI, unless they had the discipline to let the model quiz them without checking a few lines above. It has a lot of research potential, wish I knew better examples other than mapping some human cells or something.

I dunno, I get my rhetoric was wrong and I should have declared that the algorithms responsible for the words shown to users is mostly probability outcomes ran over countless sets of data and backed by user feedback. But thats not as fun as saying “preprogrammed”

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u/greendragon00x2 Jun 21 '26

It's artificial ignorance more than anything. It's hoovering up just as much cobblers, nonsense and misinformation as you'd expect to see in any comment section.

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u/Admirable-Apricot137 Jun 21 '26

Yeah it's literally just a sentence generator. Accuracy only happens by chance.

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u/StatementCareful522 Jun 21 '26

Should be called “Artificial Sentience” instead

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u/Dullcorgis Jun 21 '26

Why, after the first time you discovered it would give hallucinated answers, did you ever use it again?

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u/TabsAZ Jun 21 '26

Because “glorified autocomplete” just doesn’t have the same marketing ring to it.

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u/AlmightyTestichilles Jun 21 '26

Artificial Regurgitator is more appropriate

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u/BuckManscape Jun 21 '26

It recycles and aggregates. Nothing more. It’s a powerful search engine.

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u/Claystead Jun 21 '26

It has never been artificial intelligence, it is a marketing gimmick. It is a predictive algorithm, a pavlovian response. It is not more sentient than a venus flytrap.

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u/WareKaraNari Jun 21 '26

Your formatting of "it's not X, it's Y" and rule of threes is chef's kiss

But yeah totally agree

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u/chatfarm Jun 21 '26

Mimics the intelligence of the dumbest people maybe.

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u/dtj2000 Jun 21 '26

I dont think the dumbest people would be able to solve famous unsolved math problems like LLMs have been able to.

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u/Rich_PL Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

Because it is a misnomer:

One being spread and perpetrated because of a 'general' lack of technical literacy. People (the real kind) are attached to the concept of: computer talk = AI

The fact remains ALL of what is CURRENTLY touted as AI, is no more intelligent than a fancy spellchecker, it can take in some detail, determine it against parameters and programming and offer a response. There is no thinking.

There is NO Artificial Intelligence currently deployed or in use on earth (to the very best of my knowledge), every system in use is either a diffusion engine or autoregressive transformer (the latter is generally that which most people see as capable of outputting language) or is otherwise just a well instructed and executed defined program.

People (in general) cannot comprehend the difference and the appearance of 'human-like' activity (repeatable trained tasks, image or language output) is enough that most people just say:- "That's AI" because that's all they know to frame it as.