- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
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Same generation who takes astrology seriously, I’m shocked
I wish philosophy was taught a bit more seriously.
An exploration on the philosophical concepts of simulacra and eidolons would probably change the way a lot of people view LLMs and other generative AI.
If they mistake those electronic parrots for conscious intelligencies, they probably won’t be the best judges for rating such things.
Lots of people lack critical thinking skills
I think an alarming number of Gen Z internet folks find it funny to skew the results of anonymous surveys.
Yeah, what is it with GenZ? Millenials would never skew the results of anonymous surveys
I’ve been hearing a lot about gen z using them for therapists, and I find that really sad and alarming.
AI is the ultimate societal yes man. It just parrots back stuff from our digital bubble because it’s trained on that bubble.
Chatgpt disagrees that it’s a yes-man:
To a certain extent, AI is like a societal “yes man.” It reflects and amplifies patterns it’s seen in its training data, which largely comes from the internet—a giant digital mirror of human beliefs, biases, conversations, and cultures. So if a bubble dominates online, AI tends to learn from that bubble.
But it’s not just parroting. Good AI models can analyze, synthesize, and even challenge or contrast ideas, depending on how they’re used and how they’re prompted. The danger is when people treat AI like an oracle, without realizing it’s built on feedback loops of existing human knowledge—flawed, biased, or brilliant as that may be.
An Alarming Number of Anyone Believes Fortune Cookies
Just … accept it, superstition is in human nature. When you take religion away from them, they need something, it’ll either be racism/fascism, or expanding conscience via drugs, or belief in UFOs, or communism at least, but they need something.
The last good one was the digital revolution, globalization, world wide web, all that, no more wars (except for some brown terrorists, but the rest is fine), everyone is free and civilized now (except for those with P*tin as president and other such types, but it’s just an imperfect democracy don’t you worry), SG-1 series.
Anything changing our lives should have an intentionally designed religious component, or humans will improvise that where they shouldn’t.
to be honest they probably wish it was conscious because it has more of a conscience than conservatives and capitalists
Why are you booing them? They’re right.
Why are we so quick to assume machines cannot achieve consciousness?
Unless you can point to me the existence of a spirit or soul, there’s nothing that makes our consciousness unique from what computers are capable of accomplishing.
This is not claiming machines cannot be conscious ever. This is claiming machines aren’t conscious right now.
LLMs are like databases with a huge list of distances allowing you to find the “shortest” (aka most likely) distance to the next word. It’s literally little more than that.
One day true AI might exist. One day perhaps… But not today.
I don’t doubt the possibility but current AI tech, no.
It’s barely even AI. The amount of faith people have in these glorified search engines and image generators Lmao
I don’t have a leg to stand on calling anything “barely AI” given what us gamedevs call AI. Like a 1d affine transformation playing pong.
It’s beating your ass, there, isn’t that intelligent enough for you?
A calculator can multiply 2887618 * 99289192 faster than you ever could. Does that make a calculator intelligent?
It’s not an agent with its own goals so in the gamedev definition, no. By calculator standards, also not. But just as a washing machine with sufficient smarts is called intelligent, so it’s, in principle, possible to call a calculator intelligent if it’s smart enough. WolframAlpha certainly qualifies. And not just the newfangled LLM-enabled stuff I used Mathematica back in the early 00s and it blew me the fuck away. That thing is certainly better at finding closed forms than me.
It’s literally peaks and valleys of probability based on linguistic rules. That’s it. It is what’s referred to as a “Chinese room” in thought experiments.
It’s likely they don’t know what the word “conscious” means
In fairness, the word “conscious” has a range of meanings. For some, it is synonymous with certain religious ideas. They would be alarmed by the “heresy”. For others, it is synonymous to claiming that some entity is entitled to the same fundamental rights as a human being. Those would be quite alarmed by the social implications. Few people use the term in a strictly empiricist sense.
Their consciousness is arguable to begin with
Everyone’s is, fellow p-zombie
“Hohohoho these young people are so dumb” Repeating exactly what we all collectively hate about boomers and x
Young people thinking their Ai waifu is real
Boomers thinking America was great and not just racist and imperialist
Gen X being really entitled because they were raised by Boomers
Millennials being the best at everything
I agree 100%.
You can not generalise a whole group on a few indiviuals
Edit: Younge people includes gen Z and alpha and now Beta too. Just daying
Yeah there’s a couple of millennial shitheads but all in all, and especially in comparison, we’re the goat. Not trying to put anyone down or such just stating facts.
We have middle sibling energy at best
Young people are always ignorant, relatively. They haven’t been around long enough to learn much, after all. However, the quality of education has been empirically declining over many decades, and mobile devices are extemely efficient accelerants of brain rot.
Honestly, responses like yours are more insufferable than the people you’re critiquing.
This is an angle I’ve never considered before, with regards to a future dystopia with a corrupt AI running the show. AI might never advance beyond what it is in 2025, but because people believe it’s a supergodbrain, we start putting way too much faith in its flawed output, and it’s our own credulity that dismantles civilisation rather than a runaway LLM with designs of its own. Misinformation unwittingly codified and sanctified by ourselves via ChatGeppetto.
The call is coming from inside the
housemechanical Turk!That’s the intended effect. People with real power think this way: “where it does work, it’ll work and not bother us with too much initiative and change, and where it doesn’t work, we know exactly what to do, so everything is covered”. Checks and balances and feedbacks and overrides and fallbacks be damned.
Humans are apes. When an ape gets to rule an empire, it remains an ape and the power kills its ability to judge.
I mean, it’s like none of you people ever consider how often humans are wrong when criticizing AI.
How often have you looked for information from humans and have been fed falsehoods as though they were true? It happens so much we’ve just gotten used to filtering out the vast majority of human responses because most of them are incorrect or unrelated to the subject.
The LLM peddlers seem to be going for that exact result. That’s why they’re calling it “AI”. Why is this surprising that non-technical people are falling for it?
That’s why they’re calling it “AI”.
That’s not why. They’re calling it AI because it is AI. AI doesn’t mean sapient or conscious.
Edit: look at this diagram if you’re still unsure:
The I implies intelligence; of which there is none because it’s not sentient. It’s intentionally deceptive because it’s used as a marketing buzzword.
You might want to look up the definition of intelligence then.
By literal definition, a flat worm has intelligence. It just didn’t have much of it. You’re using the colloquial definition of intelligence, which uses human intelligence as a baseline.
I’ll leave this graphic here to help you visualize what I mean:
Please do post this graphic again, I don’t think I’ve quite grasped it yet
Ok. I won’t.
Oh, yes. I forgot that LLM have creativity, abstract thinking and understanding. Thanks for the reminder. /s
It’s not a requirement to have all those things. Having just one is enough to meet the definition. Such as problem solving, which LLMs are capable of doing.
In the general population it does. Most people are not using an academic definition of AI, they are using a definition formed from popular science fiction.
Yes, that’s the point. You’d think they could have, at least, looked into a dictionary at some point in the last 2 years. But nope, everyone else is wrong. A round of applause for the paragons of human intelligence.
You have that backwards. People are using the colloquial definition of AI.
“Intelligence” is defined by a group of things like pattern recognition, ability to use tools, problem solving, etc. If one of those definitions are met then the thing in question can be said to have intelligence.
A flat worm has intelligence, just very little of it. An object detection model has intelligence (pattern recognition) just not a lot of it. An LLM has more intelligence than a basic object detection model, but still far less than a human.
I’m not gonna lie, most people like you are afraid to entertain the idea of AI being conscious because it makes you look at your own consciousness as not being all that special or unique.
Do you believe in spirits, souls, or god genes?
No, it’s because it isn’t conscious. An LLM is a static model (all our AI models are in fact). For something to be conscious or sapient it would require a neural net that can morph and adapt in real-time. Nothing currently can do that. Training and inference are completely separate modes. A real AGI would have to have the training and inference steps occurring at once and continuously.
That’s fine, but I was referring to AI as a concept and not just its current iteration or implementation.
I agree that it’s not conscious now, but someday it could be.
That’s the same as arguing “life” is conscious, even though most life isn’t conscious or sapient.
Some day there could be AI that’s conscious, and when it happens we will call that AI conscious. That still doesn’t make all other AI conscious.
It’s such a weirdly binary viewpoint.
wisdom would be nice.
Lol.
Average people these days are just so… average. Glad I’m not like you people anymore.
shine on you special snowflake troll
Stay in school.
You don’t have to be tech person to see through bullshit. Any person with mid level expertise can test the limits of the current LLM capabilities. It can’t provide consistently objectively correct outputs. It is still a useful tool though.
Mid level expertise in basically anything may be out of reach for younger gen z given the state of the education systems they lived through and the business practices that no longer prioritize training or continuing education. Assuming they can get hired at all when everyone is only hiring senior staff
Education was always garbage though. It is designed to generate obidient wage slaves. Any person who wanted to get good always knew that self study is the only way to get leveled up.
Your coworkers have no incentive to train you. This has also started since at least 1990s. Just how corpos operate.
Point I am making, none of this is new or specific to gen z
I guess covid is unique to them tho but covid didn’t make education shite, it just exposed it imho
Education was always garbage though. It is designed to generate obidient wage slaves.
in the US
Fixed that for you
Naive
Lots of attacks on Gen Z here, some points valid about the education that they were given from the older generations (yet it’s their fault somehow). Good thing none of the other generations are being fooled by AI marketing tactics, right?
The debate on consciousness is one we should be having, even if LLMs themselves aren’t really there. If you’re new to the discussion, look up AI safety and the alignment problem. Then realize that while people think it’s about preparing for a true AGI with something akin to consciousness and the dangers that we could face, we have have alignment problems without an artificial intelligence. If we think a machine (or even a person) is doing things because of the same reasons we want them done, and they aren’t but we can’t tell that, that’s an alignment problem. Everything’s fine until they follow their goals and the goals suddenly line up differently than ours. And the dilemma is - there’s not any good solutions.
But back to the topic. All this is not the fault of Gen Z. We built this world the way it is and raised them to be gullible and dependent on technology. Using them as a scapegoat (those dumb kids) is ignoring our own failures.
This. I also see lots of things feeling like “oooooh these young people!” Also covid would have been gen alpha. Gen Z is mostly in their 20s now
Not the fault of prior generations, either. They were raised by their parents, and them by their parents, and so on.
Sometime way back there was a primordial multicellular life form that should have known better.
The main point here (which I think is valid despite my status as a not in this group Gen Z) is that we’re still like really young? I’m 20 dude, it’s just not my or my friends fault that school failed us. The fact it failed us was by design and despite my own and others complaints it’s continued to fail the next generation and alpha is already, very clearly struggling. I really just don’t think there’s much ground to argue about how Gen Z by and large should somehow know better. The whole point of the public education system is to ensure we well educate our children, it’s simply not my or any child’s fault that school is failing to do so. Now that I’m an adult I can, and I do push for improved education but clearly people like me don’t have our priorities straight seeing who got elected…
Tbh, I’m in my 40ies and I don’t think my education was so much better than what younger generations are getting. I’m a software engineer and most of the skills I need now are not skills I learned in school or even university.
I started learning programming when I was 9 because my father gave me his old Apple II computer to see what I would do. At the time, this was a privilege. Most children did not get that kind of early exposure. It also made me learn some English early.
In high school, we eventually had some basic programming classes. I was the guy the teacher asked when something didn’t work. Or when he forgot where the semicolons go in Pascal. During one year, instead of programming, there was a pilot project where we’d learn about computer aided math using Waterloo Maple that just barely ran on our old 486es. That course was great but after two months the teacher ran out of things to teach us because the math became “too advanced for us”.
And yes the internet existed at the time; I had access to it at home starting 1994. We learned nothing about it in school.
When I first went to university I had an Apple PowerBook that I bought from money I earned myself. Even though I worked for it, this was privilege too; most kids couldn’t afford what was a very expensive laptop then, or any laptop. But the reason I’m bringing it up is that my university’s web site at the time did not work on it. They had managed to implement even simple buttons that could have been links as Java applets that only worked on Windows. Those were the people I was supposed to learn computer science from. Which, by the way, at the time still meant “math with a side of computer science”. My generation literally could not study in an IT related field if we couldn’t understand university major level math (this changed quickly in the following years in my country, but still).
So while I don’t disagree about education having a lot of room for optimization, when it comes to more recent technologies like AI, it also makes me a bit salty when all of the blame is assigned to education. The generations currently in education, at least in developed countries, have access to so much that my generation only had when our parents were rich or at least nerds like my father (he was a teacher, so we were not rich). And yet, sometimes it feels like they just aren’t interested in doing anything with this access. At least compared to what I would have done with it.
At the same time, also keep in mind that when you say things like education doesn’t prepare us for AI or whatever other new thing (it used to be just the internet, or “new media”, before), those who you are expecting the education from are the people of my generation, who did not grow up with any of this, and who were not taught about any of it when we were young. We don’t have those answers either… this stuff is new for everyone. And for the people you expect to teach, it’s way more alien than it is for you. This was true when I went to school too, and I think it’s inevitable in a world moving this fast.
Failure often comes at multiple points, it doesn’t just fail at one. It’s a failure of education, of social pressures, of lack of positive environments, and yes of choice. The problem with free will is that you have the chance to choose wrong. You can blame everyone in the world, but if you don’t take accountability for your own actions and choices, nothing will change.
There has never been a time with as much access to information as now. While there as much, likely more, misinformation… that does not mean individuals have no culpability for their own lack of knowledge or understanding.
That doesn’t mean it’s exclusively their fault, or even anywhere near a majority. But that does not mean they lose all free will for their own actions. It does not mean they have no ability to be better.
Should we place the weight of the world on their shoulders? Absolutely not, that is liable to break them. But we also shouldn’t hide them from the burden of their own free will. That only weakens them.
I find it unfair to blame my peers for things largly out of their control. If you are born into an abusive family you’ll only ever know if you happen to luck into the information that such behavior is unhealthy. Is it some of their faults? Certainly, I know people who are willfully stupid and refuse to learn but even knowing these people I feel pretty uncomfortable blaming them for it. I’ve talked to them, I’ve educated them on stuff they were willfully ignorant of and do you know what it generally boils down to? School has taught them that learning things is hard and a waste of their time. They’d rather waste hours trying to get an LLM to generate a script for them than sit down and figure out how to do it despite knowing I’d happily help them.
School has managed to taint “learning” in the minds of many of my peers to such an extent that it should be avoided at any cost. School has failed us, is still failing the current generation and nothing is going to be done about it because it’s working as it’s meant to. This is the intended outcome. Like genuinely the scale of the fuckup is to the extent that enjoying reading is not just rare but seen as weird. We’ve managed to take one of the best ways to educate yourself and instill dread in our children when it’s brought up. How do we expect people who’ve been taught to hate reading to just magically turn around and unfuck themselves? What’d they see a really motivating Tik Tok or some shit? I despise that platform but like seriously you older people just don’t it man. Been complaing since middle school and now people wanna turn around and blame us as if it’s some personal failing it’s fucked up dude. Our education sucks, has sucked and will continue to suck even worse until we stop pretending like this is some kind of personal failing.
Life is unfair, but unless we acknowledge our own failings it will never get better.
You want to walk through life blaming everyone else for everything that goes wrong in your life and take no responsibility for your own actions? Feel free. But just know nothing will ever get better for you.
I even acknowledge, multiple times, that it is not solely the fault of the person. But that does not mean they have no will of their own, no ability to change their circumstances. Sometimes that freedom is not enough, but unless you do something to take charge of your own life, again, nothing will ever change.
That’s a bit of a reach. We should have stayed in the trees though, but the trees started disappearing and we had to change.
They also are the dumbest generation with a COVID education handicap and the least technological literacy in terms of mechanics comprehension. They have grown up with technology that is refined enough to not need to learn troubleshooting skills past “reboot it”.
How they don’t understand that a LLM can’t be conscious is not surprising. LLMs are a neat trick, but far from anything close to consciousness or intelligence.
How they don’t understand that a LLM can’t be conscious is not surprising
It’s because they’re all atheists! They don’t know that souls are granted to humans by the gods.
Have fun with your back problems!
It will happen to YOU!
