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paulcole 3 hours ago

> Stochastic Parrot

Nearly all (99%+) people who use this phrase are anti-AI and just looking to show off how much they dislike AI and how clever they can be in insulting it.

So it's a great phrase because in just about every case I can ignore what someone says afterwards.

Similar to "glorified autocomplete."

andrewla 3 hours ago | parent [-]

At least "glorified autocomplete" is technically accurate, even if vastly underestimating the capability of LLMs. It's just trying to make something very impressive sound trivial.

From an external standpoint, talking to another human, it's like the other human says one word and then says the next word. That's just how language works. Humans look like "glorified autocomplete" from this perspective.

I mean, looking at the time evolution of the state of the universe, one could say that all of physics and creation is "glorified autocomplete" to posit a next state of the universe given current and past state.

delis-thumbs-7e 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s not how language works https://www.telelib.com/authors/J/JoyceJames/prose/finnegans...

andrewla 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I dunno, man, I looked at that text and I see one word after another.

Obviously language and the connection to human thought is more subtle than this; I think we all have a rich inner life. Just from an external perspective we can't observe it; all we can see is the token/phoneme stream. I'm just saying that it's a mistake to try to criticize LLMs on this basis because it's hard to see how the same criticism would not apply to any system (like humans) that generate language.

delis-thumbs-7e an hour ago | parent [-]

If you want to see words form a shape I could point you towards concrete poetry, but I guess there is no point. Joyce wrote Finnegan’s Wake for 17 years and although superficially it seems complete gibberish, trodding through it you find meaning to words that are in no dictionary, sentence structures alien to English, etc. but still you are able to understand it, and perhaps some way the mind that produced it. So I disagree with you, we can observe each other’s inner life. It is always unexpected, strange, exciting, but always rooted to our shared experience or what it like being a very big and confused ape.

LLM’s are usually unexpected only when they malfunction and sprout same letter again and again etc - hardly a literary masterpiece. They make very easily recognisable patterns that we can use as helpful tools, but in the end they are devoid of any meaning apart from what we give them. Of course one could say same about art and all language, but I think there still is the fact that we apes somehow recognise each other. And besides, we do know the internal functions that drive the parroting. It is admittedly bit tricky, but in no way as magical as people purport it to be.

paulcole 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> one could say that all of physics and creation is "glorified autocomplete"

Exhibit A.