this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
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[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (13 children)

i really, really don't get how so many people are making the leaps from "neural nets are effective at text prediction" to "the machine learns like a human does" to "we're going to be intellectually outclassed by Microsoft Clippy in ten years".

like it's multiple modes of failing to even understand the question happening at once. i'm no philosopher; i have no coherent definition of "intelligence", but it's also pretty obvious that all LLM's are doing is statistical extrapolation on language. i'm just baffled at how many so-called enthusiasts and skeptics alike just... completely fail at the first step of asking "so what exactly is the program doing?"

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (6 children)

this article/dynamic comes to mind for me in this, along with a toot I saw the other day but don't currently have the link for. the toot detailed a story of some teacher somewhere speaking about ai hype, making a pencil or something personable with googly eyes and making it "speak", then breaking it in half the moment people were even slightly "engaged" with the idea of a person'd pencil - the point of it was that people are remarkably good at seeing personhood/consciousness/etc in things where it just outright isn't there

(combined with a bit of en vogue hype wave fuckery, where genpop follows and uses this stuff, but they're not quite the drivers of the itsintelligent.gif crowd)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Transcript: a post by Greg Stolze on Bluesky.

I heard some professor put googly eyes on a pencil and waved it at his class saying "Hi! I'm Tim the pencil! I love helping children with their homework but my favorite is drawing pictures!"

Then, without warning, he snapped the pencil in half.

When half his college students gasped, he said "THAT'S where all this AI hype comes from. We're not good at programming consciousness. But we're GREAT at imagining non-conscious things are people."

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

how exactly did he get googly eyes on a pencil. big "then an eagle flew around the classroom" energy

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