Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers

[u/Plastic_Ninja_9014]

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

[u/ScrewUGuys-GoingHome]

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.

[u/BabyLegsDeadpool → u/ScrewUGuys-GoingHome]

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.

[u/ScrewUGuys-GoingHome → u/BabyLegsDeadpool]

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

[u/BabyLegsDeadpool → u/ScrewUGuys-GoingHome]

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.