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by Last5Digits 741 days ago
At this point, I strongly urge you to think about what could possibly change your mind. Because if you can't think of anything, then that means that this opinion is not founded on reasoning.

The text LLMs produce is not just plausible in a "looks like human text" sense, as you'd very well know if you actually thought about it. When ChatGPT generates a fake library that looks correct, then the library must seem sensible to fool people. This can't be just a language trick anymore, it must have a similarity to the underlying structure of the problem space to look reasonable.
1 comments
chx 741 days ago
It indeed lies on very solid reasoning: a probabilistic predictor doesn't deal in facts. You'd need CyC for that.
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Last5Digits 740 days ago
The fact that you refuse to engage with my points tells me otherwise.

You're drawing meaningless distinctions, anyone who has ever used Cyc will tell you that it makes massive mistakes and spits out incorrect information all the time.

But that is even true of humans, and every other system you can imagine. Facts aren't these magical things living in your brain, they're information with a high probability of accurately modeling reality.

When someone tells you x happened in y at time z. Then that only becomes a fact if the probability of the source being correct is high enough, that's it. 99% of all of your knowledge is only a fact to you because you extracted it from a source that your heuristics told you is trustworthy enough. There is never absolute certainty, it's all just probability.

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chx 740 days ago
> Facts aren't these magical things living in your brain, they're information with a high probability of accurately modeling reality.

Truly people have completely lost it because of the AI hype.

There are facts. They are not probabilistic, they are just that: facts. Despite Mencken's 1917 long essay "A Neglected Anniversary" which became really popular, the bathtub didn't arrive to the United States in 1842 and it didn't became popular because President Fillmore installed one. A Kia ad in 2008 still referred to this without realizing it's a made up story to distract from World War I. https://chatgpt.com/c/6b1869a7-c0d7-46e9-bcb5-7a7c78dc3d53 https://sniggle.net/bathtub.php

Notably in 1829 the Tremont Hotel in Boston had indoor plumbing and baths (copper and tin bathtubs) and in 1833 President Andrew Jackson had installed iron pipes in the Ground Floor Corridor and a bathing room in the East Wing. Well before 1842.

There's nothing probabilistic about this.

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