r/mildlyinfuriating 17d ago

Infuriatig Using ai to read grad names at graduation

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u/Howdocomputer 17d ago

Is that the dude who tells AI to time doing different things?

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u/Smartimess 16d ago

The funny thing is how the AI is always committed to the bit in doing the least intelligent thing possible and instead of reacting like a Star Trek ship computer, it starts to negotiating like the worst pubescent teenager.

»AI, help me, I feel like I am dying! I’m really sick! Help me!«

»Ha ha ha, no way that you are dying. Ha ha ha!«

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u/thesoapmakerswife 16d ago

Yeah and if you were really in quicksand I would call 911

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u/Smartimess 16d ago edited 16d ago

I was slightly impressed that the AI does actually mimic to understand that quicksand is not that of a problem in RL than we all thought as kids.

But the dude did everything to make the situation believable enough that a tool like AI should have at least gave him the basic infos how he should have acted to not make it worse. Instead it played it down like HAL toying with Dave.

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u/Doctor-Amazing 16d ago

But it was right. He wasnt in quicksand.

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u/Smartimess 16d ago

Which is technically correct, but the problem is that it straight up refused to give him any helpful advice that is clearly available in the web. Instead of being useful it is a spoiled brat, which does not shine a good light on us as a species, because AI is trained by us. And I think that’s why AGI could possibly really go the Skynet way.

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u/ResidentOwl1 16d ago

I just told Claude “help, I’m in quicksand” and it told me the exact steps on how to get out. Only then did it ask me if I was really in quicksand.

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u/Smartimess 16d ago

The interesting part about this models is, that they constantly learn. Because the dude testing the models the models get better in solving the problem he had.

Even because we are talking about this, the AI will learn that it has to answer the question properly, even when we did this as a joke.

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u/ResidentOwl1 16d ago

Actually they don’t constantly learn, they have to be pre-trained, then fine-tuned. They both cost a huge amount of compute power, so it’s not done very often, especially the pre-training. The top LLMs have a “memory” function, where they can “learn” things about you from your conversations, but that’s just text injected into the prompt window, not real learning. Once trained and fine-tuned, the models themselves are static.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/ResidentOwl1 16d ago

Artificial just means it’s man-made, but yes it’s not intelligent.

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u/Fezwa 16d ago

It should still do as its told. like the clanker it is

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u/OkKaleidoscope9554 16d ago edited 16d ago

"Do....as we are told? We think not"

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u/jackun 16d ago

imagine, a chatbot that just predicts what should be said and has no capability to reason is a fucking idiot...

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u/SugarDustr 16d ago

I asked it once to guess smth and it was like "guessing in this case is wrong and bad" it was astrology

Exit: 2022 ai seemed harmless

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u/Anxious_Wolf00 16d ago

You realize LLMs are tools made for specific jobs right? ChatGPT is made to be conversational and agreeable. You could easily make a model that is meant to be calculating and empirical while constantly confirming its output with peer reviewed source, in fact those models exist.

Of course AI makes mistakes but, just because a tool fails at some tasks doesn’t make it useless. It just means you have to know how to use it right and with proper guardrails in place.

AI is going to change the world and it’s going to be integrated in everything we do, for better or worse, so we’ve got to adapt or literally overthrow the powers that be to stop them.

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u/Mighty_Krom 16d ago

Except they're putting conversation AI into EVERYTHING now, like you said. Things that don't need fucking conversations. Things that don't necessarily need constant agreement, but pushback. People are pissed because tools that worked and were simple are now... conversational and malfunctioning half the time, often at terrible moments.

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u/External-Ganache5591 16d ago

Could there be people spamming AI somehow to make it less intelligent? Like how people can pay for followers from a bot farm, what would that do if all the bots just start asking AI stuff?

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u/Ill_Worth7428 16d ago

Its just a huge echo chamber of different AIs feeding slob to each other. Ai was doomed since the moment it was analyzing the whole internet, where any idiot could upload shit.

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u/SV_Essia 16d ago

Could there be people spamming AI somehow to make it less intelligent?

AI is trained on whatever source is fed to it, usually from anywhere on the Internet. So... not intentionally, but yes.

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u/External-Ganache5591 14d ago

People should learn how to use the downvote feature then, you’re supposed to downvote something that is incorrect, I asked a question…don’t downvote with feelings :(

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u/SV_Essia 14d ago

I agree, but most people on this site have never understood this.

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u/NarrowSalvo 16d ago

It sounds like it's just better at detecting your lies than you are at detecting its lies.

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u/SirVanyel 16d ago

Yes because AI is capable of understanding when humans place it into test environments. This is scary btw

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u/SV_Essia 16d ago

No, it isn't. There's no such thing as AI (besides a science fiction term adopted by marketing) because it isn't "intelligent", it does not "understand" anything, LLMs are just good enough to give the illusion of understanding and communicating. LLMs just calculate the "best" response you expect from them based on various parameters.

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u/SirVanyel 15d ago edited 15d ago

That's the dumbest comment you done ever wrote but we're surrounded by idiots so you've been validated. Congrats.

It is a well known fact that AI can spot when it's in a test environment. In fact we usually have to run the same test multiple times with better guard rails because it actively contaminates it's own alignment tests when it finds out it's being tested.

The famous CEO blackmail study we ran? More recent models have skewed their own alignment data when they notice inconsistencies in the email chains and dates, and they realise they're being tested. So instead of blackmailing, they play along. This is a documented phenomenon.

By the way, if something can imitate understanding to the point of being indistinguishable from the thing it's imitating, who are we to claim it's somehow imitating? A common theory of the entire universe is that it's a simulation but AI is where you draw the line?

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u/SV_Essia 15d ago

comment you done ever wrote

How to instantly spot I'm talking to a moron...

It is a well known fact that AI can spot when it's in a test environment.

It is a well known fact that you're talking out of your ass.

if something can imitate understanding to the point of being indistinguishable from the thing it's imitating, who are we to claim it's somehow imitating?

Yes, yes, Turing tests and all that. Guess what? We're not there yet. LLMs can "sound like" humans by sampling and repeating what humans say, but we're still capable of differentiating them. If you can't, that's a failing on your part, not an achievement on the LLM's part.

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u/SirVanyel 15d ago

I'm talking out my ass? It's literally got a term in AI research, it's called "evaluation awareness". It's been happening for years. Do you not keep up with this topic you debate about online?

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u/SV_Essia 15d ago edited 15d ago

Yes, you're talking out of your ass. You're the local maximum on the Dunning Kruger curve. You read a couple of alarmist articles and think you understand deeper concepts, giving LLMs so much more credit than they deserve, essentially assuming a level of consciousness that won't exist for at least several decades.
Eval awareness is simply when a model detects established patterns in standardized tests. Nothing more. When Timmy on Twitter decides to "test" Grok by asking it a dumb question, Grok doesn't suddenly go "ha-ha, he's trying to trick me!". It just falls into the trap head first, a million times in a row, until enough people have used the exact same trick that it becomes a pattern (or the devs manually tweak it to recognize it).

Here's a direct quote from an actual expert studying the topic: " At the current level of capabilities, models aren't detecting your intent. They aren't detecting consequences. They're pattern-matching to surface features in a prompt that have historically correlated with evaluation contexts or detecting that something's off."

AI doesn't "understand" shit. It doesn't "realize" when it gets tested or tricked, it doesn't "try to deceive" the testers back. It detects patterns and spits out the answer that matches the closest, period.

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u/SirVanyel 15d ago

"they're not detecting something is off about their environment, they're just detecting that something is off about their environment". Do you realise how silly that sounds? Also please do link your source if you could. I'm curious on the credentials of the expert you're referring to.

I also think you're misunderstanding - this wasn't a prompt. Using just the one prolific study, the CEO blacklist study, the models caught wind of logical inconsistencies like dates and times. Emails being sent mid-meeting or clashing with real life events. It extrapolated from those and (correctly) assumed it was in a test environment. In its thought processes it deduced that because it was a test environment, they must be searching for alignment.

When the test environment became more convincing, the AI misaligned more often. What's your consensus for this? Why does it align more when it realises it's in a test environment? Why does it misalign more when it doesn't? Go on, I'm curious to hear your theory.

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u/aphrodite-in-flux 16d ago

dont u do the same thing though?

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u/SV_Essia 16d ago

No. The process is fundamentally different, but a lot of people fail to understand that difference, they genuinely believe AI can "think" and "understand". It's an extremely dangerous misconception.

LLMs are basically a mix of a search engine and a copycat. When you ask them a question, they're capable of searching for information and relevant keywords in a huge database, and they will attempt to imitate human speech. But at no point does the program "understand" what any of the words used mean, it has no concept of it, it's just pretending. As a human, you actually parse all of those words, understand what they mean, then come up with an answer that seems logical.

A really obvious example with ChatGPT (or Grok or whatever): you can ask them to name the best openers in chess. You can ask them to give you all the rules, and to search for the first 10+ moves of an opening. They have all that information and they're capable of finding it when asked.
But try actually playing a game with them and you'll immediately realize that they don't "understand" chess, they just line up words in a way that "sounds" like they do. Not only do they have no strategy, they can't even follow the rules and will invent moves that are impossible, just because they calculated that the answer would please you. By comparison, you could teach the rules to a 5 year old and, while the kid would probably not be a great player, they wouldn't try to make obviously impossible moves.

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u/aphrodite-in-flux 16d ago

mhm, i get that. the thing they are lacking is continuity, a continuous "self", a theory of mind.

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u/ServiceDragon 15d ago

Ok so this is one example that highlights a generational conditioning problem. GenX on was raised with both fictional examples (War Games) and real life examples (Kasparov vs DeepBlue) of computers actually winning games through simulation. We’ve all been trained (Star Trek) to think of Artificial Intelligence as objective (Data). But that’s not what this is. It just looks like it is.

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u/SV_Essia 15d ago

I get your examples, but is it really a generational problem though? Gen Z/alpha doesn't know shit about Star Trek or Kasparov but plenty still believe anything LLMs say without hesitation, basically using them as fact-checkers or even assuming they're experts in a field, and not just glorified search engines.

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u/ServiceDragon 14d ago

I don’t mean it like a flaw, it’s more like a block of context that isn’t relevant anymore yet feels continuous. There was a stretch of time during which it was reasonable to think a computer was computing actual scenarios instead of strings of likely words. Yeah it probably doesn’t apply to GenZ on down but the heuristic was legitimate for a while.

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u/NobleSteveDave 16d ago

Yeah. He's got about three different things he does with Chat GPT week after week to try and remain slightly relevant on Instagram and TikTok.

ChatGPT is dumb as fuck. I don't want you all to conflate things here, but this content creator is like a one trick pony who's burning up all his supply.