this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Ai code is specifically annoying because it looks like it would work, but its just plausible bullshit.
And that's what happens when you spend a trillion dollars on an autocomplete: amazing at making things look like whatever it's imitating, but with zero understanding of why the original looked that way.
I mean, there's about a billion ways it's been shown to have actual coherent originality at this point, and so it must have understanding of some kind. That's how I know I and other humans have understanding, after all.
What it's not is aligned to care about anything other than making plausible-looking text.
Coherent originality does not point to the machine’s understanding; the human is the one capable of finding a result coherent and weighting their program to produce more results in that vein.
Your brain does not function in the same way as an artificial neural network, nor are they even in the same neighborhood of capability. John Carmack estimates the brain to be four orders of magnitude more efficient in its thinking; Andrej Karpathy says six.
And none of these tech companies even pretend that they’ve invented a caring machine that they just haven’t inspired yet. Don’t ascribe further moral and intellectual capabilities to server racks than do the people who advertise them.
You got the "originality" part there, right? I'm talking about tasks that never came close to being in the training data. Would you like me to link some of the research?
Given that both biological and computer neural nets very by orders of magnitude in size, that means pretty little. It's true that one is based on continuous floats and the other is dynamic peaks, but the end result is often remarkably similar in function and behavior.
If you would like to link some abstracts you find in a DuckDuckGo search that’s fine.
Can you please explain what you’re trying to say here?
Well I've got the name for my autobiography now.
"Specifically Annoying" or "Plausible Bullshit"? I'd buy the latter.
This is where I got the term from: https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/17/plausible-sentence-generators/
It needs good feedback. Agentic systems like Roo Code and Claude Code run compilers and tests until it works (just gotta make sure to tell it to leave the tests alone)