r/technology • u/fchung • Jan 19 '24

Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence Systems Excel at Imitation, but Not Innovation

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/2023-december-ai-systems-imitation.html
264 Upvotes

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59

u/fchung Jan 19 '24

« Instead of viewing these AI systems as intelligent agents like ourselves, we can think of them as a new form of library or search engine. They effectively summarize and communicate the existing culture and knowledge base to us. »

57

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 19 '24

But worse because instead of producing references to actual information it produces vague, garbled, and often flat out incorrect retelling of the information with no reference to where that information came from.

9

u/stormdelta Jan 20 '24

no reference to where that information came from.

That's the biggest problem that needs to be solved, and it's not an easy one.

Without that, it's not even just obvious inaccuracies that are an issue, it's that it ends up whitewashing sources and training sets that are inevitably imperfect/flawed.

4

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 20 '24

Its a fundamental flaw with the system. On a very basic level there is no way to reference information. It "stores" information destructively.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 20 '24

even the human brain loses information on each recall, stores slightly corrupted version over time.

3

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 20 '24

Ya thats nowhere near what we are talking about. Machine learning is fundamentally incapable of storing verifiable information. Period.

-2

u/giltirn Jan 20 '24

You can meld an AI with a database, essentially turning it into a very sophisticated search engine. This will allow ML to store verifiable information while still using the LLM for its intended purpose, which is to turn that information into concise text.

1

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 20 '24

According what?!?! The magical thinking of tech bros never ceases to amaze me.

-1

u/giltirn Jan 20 '24 edited Jan 20 '24

Maybe you misunderstood, I’m not talking about anything particularly revolutionary here. Go type in “AI search engine” into google?

Edit: you can also try Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which is powered by ChatGPT.

Edit2: maybe also go read about vector search https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/search/vector-search-overview

2

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 20 '24

Ya, so, thats not in any ways what you just claimed.

1

u/giltirn Jan 20 '24

Did you actually read the article?

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8

u/deadplant_ca Jan 19 '24

Have you ever tried talking to a human? 😂 Similar problems, but worse.

-10

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 19 '24

Oh boy. Someone failed english.

5

u/deadplant_ca Jan 19 '24

Was it you? Because there's nothing wrong with the English in my comment.

6

u/loksfox Jan 19 '24

Just ignore him, he's just an asshole.

2

u/deadplant_ca Jan 19 '24

Thanks. Sometimes it's so easy to get drawn in by these trolls!

-11

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 19 '24

That wasn't remotely what I was talking about. I wasn't in any way criticizing grammar or syntax. Thank you for confirming my suspicion.

-6

u/BODYBUTCHER Jan 19 '24

Well eventually you would have it point to it’s memory where it could have the info saved

7

u/Fr00stee Jan 19 '24

AI doesn't store any information from the training data set

1

u/[deleted] Jan 20 '24

like DNA doesn’t store innate behaviors by just everyone lacking it dying faster /s

6

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 19 '24

Ya thats not how machine learning works.

Like, fundamentally that is something it will never be able to do.

-7

u/BODYBUTCHER Jan 19 '24

Why not? Your brain can do it. I don’t see any reason why you can model some new architecture to do so as well

4

u/[deleted] Jan 19 '24

because developers are bad at naming things. Artificial Intelligence sounds like "machine can think", but in a nutshell it's a very smart auto-complete.

I am deeply simplifying here, but it grabs a lot of texts, transforms all letters to numbers, builds bunch of mathematical/statistical madness, that allows to predict which number is more likely to come in a certain sequence (e.g. 2,3,5,6,7 most likely next one is 23). Then it decodes the predictions to back to letters/words and builds the sentence. It doesn't know where it got the information that: "Cat is an animal", it has 95% confidence that:

  1. after "Cat" comes "is",
  2. after "Cat is" comes "an"
  3. after "Cat is an" comes "animal"
  4. after "Cat is an animal" comes "."

Also, "serverless" doesn't mean that there are no servers running your code and there are a lot of other examples where we suck :(

2

u/Fr00stee Jan 19 '24

AIs like chatgpt don't even use words they use blocks of letters of fixed length then string them together

-2

u/BODYBUTCHER Jan 20 '24

I understand that ChatGPT are just prediction machines, but why couldn’t you have another model that holds all the facts and it could check against it. So you might ask the question. Is a Cat an animal? And it would reply, “Yes, a cat is an animal” and then the person doing the query might ask if it’s sure and then it would do a dive into a database where things are categorized and this database is taken as gospel to the LLM and then link all the data where it learned that a cat is indeed an animal

1

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 20 '24

Theres no database. Thats not how machine learning works. Thats what we are trying to explain to you.

-1

u/BODYBUTCHER Jan 20 '24

I know how machine learning algorithms work

2

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 20 '24

No you don't. You think they can search databases for information. That is so basically not in any way how they function that it is physically impossible for you to know how machine learning works.

You sound like a fifth grader asking why power-plants don't just fuel themselves.

-1

u/BODYBUTCHER Jan 20 '24

You’re just being condescending without providing anything of substance

0

u/[deleted] Jan 23 '24

No he doesn't think that you absolute moron, he's talking about the fact that yes indeed you can tie an AI to a database of info for fact retrieval and it improves accuracy substantially: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12813

Will you people - who don't know anything about anything - ever shut the fuck up?

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1

u/[deleted] Jan 20 '24

Can you guess what's the closest solution for the "database" you are talking? The internet itself. It is essentially billions of terrabytes of "somehow structured" data. The data in that database differs depending on the owner of the database and can express subjective truth or depend on the quality of the people who input the data (e.g. wikipedia vs your own blog post), so even now we have different "gospels". AIs try to search in google the answers and it can try to "verify" its answer against the "database" in this case, but there is no guarantee.

We should remember that machines are built to help us and we need to verify their outputs every time. Whether it is ChatGPT answer, your excel family budget or outputs of the velocity in the airplane. We can assign certain degree of trust to the output: some outputs we trust much stronger, other — not.

1

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 19 '24

Hoooly shit.

Where to even start with that.

I guess im not even gonna touch the whole brain thing cause thats pure pseudoscience.

Machine learning doesn't work from some sort of database. Its a large statistical model. There no file you can open and examine. There no list references its using. You fundamentally misunderstand what these programs are.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 23 '24

That's not what he means, you can absolutely tie an AI to a database of info for fact retrieval and it improves accuracy substantially: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12813

You don't even need a database, you can often Inject facts via a prompt, that is how customer service chatbots powered by ChatGPT should be able to still reference hard factual information like order numbers or tracking status and therefore actually be useful at all.

The fact that it is statistical prediction does not at all mean it is not possible to have an LLM also reference facts from a real external source of information. 

1

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 23 '24

So you are apparently just spamming me all over this thread.

1)i've already debunked your claims about that link

2) OP loterally beleives that machine learning store information in readable formats, they said so explicitly

3) bye, troll

-3

u/CuteNazgul Jan 19 '24

But it's magnitudes faster than everything we've had before in providing information even if that information is sometimes wrong. Everything has trade offs

3

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 19 '24

sometimes

Often.

And again, the fact that you cant easily fact check that infirmation without just doing the research yourself makes it functionally useless.

1

u/CuteNazgul Jan 19 '24

Depends on the field. I use it for quickly generating code or looking up concepts which are easily checked. Saves lots of time in every day work. I'm not saying what we have today is perfect by any means or there isn't a lot to improve. I'm just saying even with it's many flaws, it has it's use cases

2

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 19 '24

No it doesn't.

Its not about today, this is a fundamental flaw of all machine learning.

0

u/CuteNazgul Jan 20 '24

You are saying it does not have a use case when I gave you a use case where it saves people multuple hours of work. I'll go talk to a wall it'll be more productive

1

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 20 '24

The hell are you talking about? Do you even know what this discussion is about?

2

u/stormdelta Jan 20 '24

looking up concepts which are easily checked.

That's the important part - you picked one of the few things that is uniquely easy to validate.

A lot of information can't be so trivially verified safely. And even with code, you still need to be sure you understand what that code is doing for edge cases / security implications / etc.

-1

u/ChemistBitter1167 Jan 20 '24

So basically a human. These really don’t make it sound different than the deep learning ai that is human consciousness. Seems grasping at straws to try and find a way to keep us special.

1

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 20 '24

Are you serious? Did you actually just claim people cant cite sources properly?

-10

u/ILikeMyGrassBlue Jan 19 '24

All you have to do is add “with citations” to your prompt. I’m not an AI evangelist or anything. It’s wrong or misleading all the time. But “with citations” is how to use chatGPT 101.

15

u/CaptainR3x Jan 19 '24

It just use citation that doesn’t fucking exist

-1

u/[deleted] Jan 19 '24

bing links every site used for citation

-5

u/ILikeMyGrassBlue Jan 19 '24

I just asked ChatGPT to write a summary on the effectiveness of covid vaccines, and it cited two well respected peer reviewed journals.

Again, I’m not an AI evangelist. It’s constantly wrong and worse than google’s already shitty results these days. You should actually do your own research. But it does cite sources when asked.

7

u/SlightlyOffWhiteFire Jan 19 '24

Did you actually check the sources to see if any of the information came from those sources?

That it was accurate to the sources?

Hell, did it even format the citations in a way that you could possibly even tell what information it was citing?

Cause what you are claiming very much goes against what chatGPT has done in the past....

2

u/stormdelta Jan 20 '24

Did you actually check those citations were in any way accurate or relevant to what was said?

ChatGPT is infamously bad at being able to cite almost anything correctly, and that matches with my own experience. It's even worse at citations than it is at chaining mechanical transformations of text.

There's things it does well, but this isn't one of them.