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by FeepingCreature 1192 days ago
> - Whether the text generated by LLMs is factual or not is purely coincidental.

No, because the probability of a word on the internet being factual is not coincidental. Factuality compresses the corpus; the truth is generally the simplest explanation for a set of observations. (The collected text of the internet is a set of observations about reality.)

> IMO, the only emergent behavior that LLMs are showing is the output they generate looks like it might have been generated by a human

The whole point of the Turing Test is to stop people from asking "yes, it acts indistinguishable from a human but is it human?" "Generating output that looks human" is in fact the entirety of AGI.
1 comments
ryanklee 1192 days ago
- If factuality were just a matter of simplicity, it wouldn't be so incredibly difficult to determine.

- The corpus of written language is full of ambiguity and contradictory statements.

- A lie makes it's way half way around the world before the truth can even get its pants on.

- What's thought true today will not be thought true tomorrow. This happens sometimes in the direction of veracity. Sometimes, the other way around.

- Factuality and consensus are not the same.

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FeepingCreature 1192 days ago
> it wouldn't be so incredibly difficult to determine.

Never said it was easy. :P

> - The corpus of written language is full of ambiguity and contradictory statements.

Right, but the truth is the one set of information that logically cannot be contradictory. That gives it an advantage in terms of compression.

The rest is correct, but just means that the learning algorithm has a harder time discovering truth, not that it's impossible.

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ryanklee 1192 days ago
> > it wouldn't be so incredibly difficult to determine.

> Never said it was easy.

My point is that this process of determination happens over time and in a non-linear fashion, so the corpus contains tons of noise around any given truth statement.

> > The corpus of written language is full of ambiguity and contradictory statements.

> Right, but the truth is the one set of information that logically cannot be contradictory.

Please refer to Godel's incompleteness theorem.

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