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“Artificial Intelligence is an unhelpful term. It serves as a vehicle for people's invalid assumptions. It hand-waves an enormous amount of complexity regarding what ‘intelligence’ even is or means.“

“Our understanding of intelligence is a moving target. We only have one meaningful fixed point to work from. We assert that humans are intelligent. Whether anything else is, is not certain. What intelligence itself is, is not certain.”

2/

“While the capabilities are fantasy, the dangers are real. These tools have denied people jobs, housing, and welfare. All erroneously. They have denied people bail and parole, in such a racist way it would be comical if it wasn't real.

“And the actual function of AI in all of these situations is to obscure liability for the harm these decisions cause.”

3/

“What [LLM] parameters don't represent is anything like knowledge or understanding. That's just not what LLMs do. The model doesn't know what those tokens mean. I want to say it only knows how they're used, but even that is over stating the case, because it doesn't •know• things. It •models• how those tokens are used.

“…The model doesn't know, or understand, or comprehend anything about that data any more than a spreadsheet containing the same information would understand it.”

4/

“The hard part of programming is building and maintaining a useful mental model of a complex system. The easy part is writing code.”

Do you see where this is going? Have I convinced you to read the whole thing yet?

https://jenniferplusplus.com/losing-the-imitation-game/

5/

Here it is: the One Weird Thing that people who aren’t programmers (or are bad programmings) just don’t understand about writing software. This is it. If you miss this, you’ll miss what LLMs can and can’t do for software development. You’ll be prey to the hype, a mark for the con.

6/

“They're positioning this tool as a universal solution, but it's only capable of doing the easy part. And even then, it's not able to do that part reliably. Human engineers will still have to evaluate and review the code that an AI writes. But they'll now have to do it without the benefit of having anyone who understands it.”

7/

“No one can explain it. No one can explain what they were thinking when they wrote it. No one can explain what they expect it to do.

“Every choice made in writing software is a choice not to do things in a different way. And there will be no one who can explain why they made this choice, and not those others. In part because it wasn't even a decision that was made. It was a probability that was realized.”

8/

@hwestiii
I mean, I give some ideas downthread about how having a bullshit generator can be useful. Just people aren’t talking about it in remotely those terms.

@inthehands @hwestiii

I think you overlook that the BS generation is done by ignoring the copyright and consent of creatives.

Whether you think (C) is good or not, under the legal system in place creative people should be getting paid for their work and not have it used without their consent.

No significant number of artists consented to Midjourney etc scraping.

@Homebrewandhacking @hwestiii
Yes, that whole area of law is just a mess right now. We need some sort of legal regime in which creative people share in the value created by their work, whatever that value is, and copyright in its current form isn’t even coming close to doing that job.

@inthehands @hwestiii

Yes sure, and more to the point, this work, my work, shouldn't be taken and fed into a slurrification machine so someone can get over their creative block unless i) I consent, ii) I get paid.

Apparently my work has no value to the creators of generative AI (but they can't actually use their machines without it.)