Comment on Enshittification of ChatGPT

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Zaleramancer@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

Hello again! So, I am interested in engaging with this question, but I have to say: My initial post is about how an LLM cannot provide actual, real citations with any degree of academic rigor for a random esoteric topic. This is because it cannot understand what a citation is, only what it is shaped like.

An LLM deals with context over content. They create structures that are legible to humans, and they are quite good at that. An LLM can totally create an entire conversation with a fictional character in their style and voice- that doesn’t mean it knows what that character is. Consider how AI art can have problems that arise from the fact that they understand the shape of something, but they don’t know what it actually is- that’s why early AI art had a lot of problems with objects ambigiously becoming other objects. The fidelity of these creations has improved with the technology, but that doesn’t imply understanding of the content.

Do you think an LLM understands the idea of truth? Do you think if you ask it to say a truthful thing, and be very sure of itself and think it over, it will produce something that’s actually more accurate or truthful- or just something that has the language hall-marks of being truthful? I know that an LLM will produce complete fabrications that distort the truth if you expect a base-line level of rigor from them, and I proved that above, in that the LLM couldn’t even accurately report the name of a book it was supposedly using as a source.

What is understanding, if the LLM can make up an entire author, book and bibliography if you ask it to tell you about the real world?

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