this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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Fuck AI

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[–] ignirtoq@fedia.io 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)

My running theory is that human evolution developed a heuristic in our brains that associates language sophistication with general intelligence, and especially with humanity. The very fact that LLMs are so good at composing sophisticated sentences triggers this heuristic and makes people anthropomorphize them far more than other kinds of AI, so they ascribe more capability to them than evidence justifies.

I actually think this may explain some earlier reporting of some weird behavior of AI researchers as well. I seem to recall reports of Google researchers believing they had created sentient AI (a quick search produced this article). The researcher was fooled by his own AI not because he drank the Koolaid, but because he fell prey to this neural heuristic that's in all of us.

[–] joel_feila@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

Yeah it has a name. The more you talk the more people Believe you are smart. It partly based on the tendency to believe what we hear first and then we check if it is.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think you're right about that.

It didn't help that The Average Person has just shy of absolutely zero understanding of how computers work despite using them mostly all day every day.

Put the two together and it's a grifter's dream.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

IMHO, if one's approach to the world is just - take it as it is and go with it - then probabilistic parrots creating the perceived elements of reality will work on that person because that's what they use to decide what to do next, but if one has an analytical approach to the world - wanting to figure out what's behind the façade to understand it and predict what might happen - then one will spot that the "logic" behind the façades created by the probabilistic parrots is segmented into little pieces of logic which are do not matched to the other little pieces of logic and do not add up to a greater building of logic (phrases are logic because all phrases have an inherent logic in how they are put together which is general, but the choice of which phrases get used in a higher logic which is far more varied than the logic inherent in phrases, so LLMs lose consistency at that level because the training material goes in a lot more directions at that level than it goes at the level of how phrases are put together).

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't think the mechanisms of evolution are necessarily involved.

We're just not used to interacting with this type of pseudo intelligence.

[–] ignirtoq@fedia.io 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

My point is that this kind of pseudo intelligence has never existed on Earth before, so evolution has had free reign to use language sophistication as a proxy for humanity and intelligence without encountering anything that would put selective pressure against this heuristic.

Human language is old. Way older than the written word. Our brains have evolved specialized regions for language processing, so evolution has clearly had time to operate while language has existed.

And LLMs are not the first sophisticated AI that's been around. We've had AI for decades, and really good AI for a while. But people don't anthropomorphize other kinds of AI nearly as much as LLMs. Sure, they ascribe some human like intelligence to any sophisticated technology, and some people in history have claimed some technology or another is alive/sentient. But with LLMs we're seeing a larger portion of the population believing that that we haven't seen in human behavior before.

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 13 hours ago

so evolution has had free reign to use language sophistication as a proxy for humanity and intelligence

my point is, evolution doesn't need to be involved in this paradigm. it could just be something children learn - this thing talks and is therefore more interactive than this other thing that doesn't talk.

Additionally, at the time in pre-history when assessing the intelligence of something could determine your life or death and thereby ability to reproduce, language may not have been a great indicator of intelligence. For example, if you encounter a band of whatever hominid encroaching on your territory, there may not be a lot of talking. You would know they were intelligent because they might have clothing or tools, but it's likely nothing would be said before the spears started to be thrown.