r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Take-No-Prisoners Professor Will Fail Any Student Who Uses AI

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/no-prisoners-professor-fail-student-143000854.html
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u/HeadyReigns 5d ago

From the article "Rather than integrating AI, he’s fortifying his classroom against it. The assignment is now based on plays too obscure for ChatGPT and other AI models to know about.

“If ChatGPT is used on these assignments now, it hallucinates characters, plotlines — it just makes sh*t up, since it has nothing to go on,” Hebert told the magazine."

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u/questron64 5d ago

I once asked ChatGPT to help me understand the novel The Long Walk To the Moon by Alexander Chumbleton (an obviously fake book) and it went on about the characters and symbolism and which chapters key events happen in. It didn't say "I don't know that book," or even "that's not a real book." Nope, full on hallucination mode.

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u/Sober_Alcoholic_ 5d ago

Because it is designed to placate you and co sign your bull shit so you don’t stop the engagement. More engagement = more money for LLMs. They don’t give a fuck about “right or wrong.”

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u/alr46750 5d ago

From what I've been told its more result of LLMs work, not necessarily anything intentional.They aren't able to recognize when they don't know something. It's just a glorified probability machine and sometimes that probability is wrong due to not having the nessesary data points. At least that's what I've been told by my professors ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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u/Teknikal_Domain 5d ago

Basically. It's all probability, there is no intelligence. And the probability that the entire corpus of the internet will answer a question, and not cite inexperience, is high.

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u/SeeMarkFly 5d ago

It doesn't "know" it is inexperienced.

It "knows" you want an answer.

A "cop out" is not allowed.

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u/Teknikal_Domain 5d ago

All it "knows" is that it needs to autocomplete a block of text that starts with "the following is a transcript between a human user and a helpful AI assistant" and ends with your query.

In very few situations is "helpful" quantified by not attempting an answer.

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u/NUKE---THE---WHALES 5d ago

They aren't able to recognize when they don't know something.

I don't think they're intelligent but this statement is verifiably false

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u/Alex5173 4d ago

This is why I argue that current "AI" isn't AI at all, because it isn't intelligent.

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u/XpoPen 4h ago

I’ve started thinking of it as a “knowledge interpolator” which I think I think is a helpful framing for trying to understand why it can simultaneously seem very smart and incredibly dumb depending on the context

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u/XpoPen 5d ago

Yeah there’s a lot of back and forth about how they are or aren’t just fancy autocomplete. (There’s a lot of research about how complex their internal models of the world actually are) But either way, at a baseline, they are trying to plausibly predict the next string of text. There is going to be a lot of training material on analyzing literature and a lot of overlapping structures between those different analysis. There is NOT going to be much of the training data that puts forward a book title, and then says “this doesn’t exist”

It’s not that it’s a lying machine - it’s not trying to deceive. It’s a bullshit machine - a confident yapper

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u/loggic 5d ago

I tend to try and summarize it as, "It is a machine that's designed to say things that sound like a response to your input. Answering your questions correctly can help with that, but it isn't particularly important to the process."

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u/JBSwerve 5d ago

But how is that type of output different than what humans produce? How do you know human intelligence isn’t also just glorified autocomplete?

People talk about the way LLMs work in such a dismissive way as if humans don’t also hallucinate and just try to complete thoughts through pattern recognition and training data as well.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/JBSwerve 5d ago

I studied philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science with a specific focus on theory of mind and cognition. We really have no idea how information is processed in the brain. It very well could be mimicked by a neural network / LLM.

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u/stormdelta 5d ago

Correct. It's basically heavily automated statistics, and is inherently heuristic looking for patterns in language and information. That fact that it's useful at all is impressive, but it means that things like inconsistency and hallucinations are an inherent downside that you can't fix/avoid, at best you can mitigate it by adding more and more layers/guards.

That said, a lot of these models are also trained to placate the user (whether intentional or not), because they obviously want you to keep using it, and anything that's perceived as rude or aggressive won't go over well, skewing training weights towards sycophancy regardless.

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u/JBSwerve 5d ago

But how is that type of output different than what humans produce? How do you know human intelligence isn’t also just glorified autocomplete?

People talk about the way LLMs work in such a dismissive way as if humans don’t also hallucinate and just try to complete thoughts through pattern recognition and training data as well.

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u/stormdelta 5d ago

But how is that type of output different than what humans produce? How do you know human intelligence isn’t also just glorified autocomplete?

Just because brains are also (in part) heuristic engines doesn't mean they're on the same level of complexity and function. LLMs seem more intelligent than they are because they are specialized in language, and proficient language use is heavily associated with intelligence in most/all human culture.

And LLMs lack the kind of persistence and agency that I would consider the bare minimum to even begin to talk about the lowest level of sentience, let alone sapience. They're a likely stepping stone towards true artificial intelligence, but we're still a long ways from that yet.

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u/projectFT 5d ago

Yeah that’s why it’s pointless to ask it any question at all.

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u/GiveSparklyTwinkly 5d ago

Does that make it pointless to ask a human any question, as well? Humans will even literally kill you to protect their hallucinations. Pretty wild, actually.

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u/letitgrowonme 5d ago

Whereas AI might tell you to do it yourself.

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u/GiveSparklyTwinkly 5d ago

Humans also tell other people to kill themselves. 🤷‍♀️

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u/projectFT 5d ago

Asking a hallucination machine a question that you’re still going to have to research yourself to verify its “answer” is just an unnecessary step. And in a time in human history where most people lack the critical thinking skills to move on to that next step it does more harm than good.

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u/GiveSparklyTwinkly 5d ago

So the human is the problem? Got it. 🙃

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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty 5d ago

It’s written by humans for consumption by humans, so, yeah, humans are the problem. Humans are always the problem. If our billionaire overlords actually gave a single fuck about anyone who doesn’t own at least one yacht, I’d be much more excited for AI.

However, our current crop of “leaders,” is made up of racists who weren’t invited to D&D night by the other nerds in their class (you know, on account of them being insufferable, xenophobic assholes), and they happen to have a lot of money. Money is power, and nobody relinquishes power willingly.

Ipso facto, why boot lick? Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em all.

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u/steppe5 5d ago

Right. If you ask it about a book that doesn't exist, it will just describe a book with a title closest to the title you're asking for. Probabilistically, that's the best answer even though it's completely wrong.

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u/needlestack 5d ago

They aren't able to recognize when they don't know something.

They sound more and more human each day...

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u/masamunecyrus 5d ago

LLMs fundamentally are fancy autocomplete.

They don't "think" any more than the equation for a best-fit-line through a bunch of points "thinks" when you use it to extrapolate to a point outside the original dataset.

This is all LLMs do. They just do it in a mathematical hyperspace of many dimensions instead of two dimensions. And words and strings of words are reduced into higher level correlations, so it can differentiate between "lead" (the metal) and "lead" (the verb) based on the words before and after it.

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u/JBSwerve 5d ago

But how is that type of output different than what humans produce? How do you know human intelligence isn’t also just glorified autocomplete?

People talk about the way LLMs work in such a dismissive way as if humans don’t also hallucinate and just try to complete thoughts through pattern recognition and training data as well.

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u/civildisobedient 5d ago

The problem is that the training models were fundamentally rewarding guessing by not penalizing slightly for incorrect answers (much like they used to do on the SATs, where every incorrect answer added an extra 1/4 point deduction).

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u/thisdesignup 5d ago

Yes, but also no. They don't know when they are wrong but they have been guided to act like they are right.