this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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[–] apotheotic@beehaw.org 4 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

You said "they literally do analyze text" when that is not, literally, what they do.

And no, we don't "all know" that. Lay persons have no way of knowing whether AI products currently in use have any capacity for genuine understanding and reasoning, other than the fact that the promotional material uses words like "understanding", "reasoning", "thought process", and people talking about it use the same words. The language we choose to use is important!

[–] GetOffMyLan@programming.dev 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

No it's not. It's pedantic and arguing semantics. It is essentially useless and a waste of everyone's time.

It applies a statistical model and returns an analysis.

I've never heard anyone argue when you say they used a computer to analyse it.

It's just the same AI bad bullshit and it's tiring in every single thread about them.

[–] knightly@pawb.social 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

LLMs arent "bad" (ignoring, of course, the massive content theft necessary to train them), but they are being wildly misused.

"Analysis" is precisely one of those misuses. Grand Theft Autocomplete can't even count, ask it how many 'e's are in "elephant" and you'll get an answer anywhere from 1 to 3.

This is because they do not read or understand, they produce strings of tokens based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next. If prompted for an analysis they'll output something that looks like an analysis, but to determine whether it is accurate or not a human has to do the work.

[–] howrar@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 weeks ago

LLMs cannot:

  • Tell fact from fiction
  • Accurately recall data from its training set
  • Count

LLMs can

  • Translate
  • Get the general vibe of a text (sentiment analysis)
  • Generate plausible text

Semantics aside, they're very different skills that require different setups to accomplish. Just because counting is an easier task than analysing text for humans, doesn't mean it's the same it's the same for a LLM. You can't use that as evidence for its inability to do the "harder" tasks.

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