there is an established term for this behaviour: hallucination.
lets me rephrase what i said before as on retrospection the point i was trying to make didnt come across:
Asking the model such as question is a pointless endeavor. It will pretty much always answer in a plausible sounding manner to whatever question you gave it.
pretty much the whole dialog is plausible given the prompts the user is required to make to illustrate the point the author of the site wanted to make... but the thing thats ironic about the site is that ... if youre prompting the model badly, it outputs garbage. though i'm pretty sure the author didn't want to make that point, to me its a perfect illustration of this.
And the same applies to asking the model to explain themselves and the related question. Asking for a source of the term is fine, and it will either respond with one and its cleared up -- or not and you know its a hallucination. nothing special about it, as they constantly hallucinating. its usually just self-correcting during the agentic loop.
"Asking the model such as question is a pointless endeavor."
It used a medical term that is not an actual term. I asked it to explain how and why it would do this, having a rudimentary understanding of the technology. I learned the technical reason. How is that a pointless endeavour to learn more about the tool I was using?
Using a term like "admit" assumes the reader (on a technical site) understands the context and what is being suggested. A bit like someone saying, "The landscape spoke to me." I don't reply to the landscape architect and say "Mate, the landscape can't actually speak" because I understand the sentiment and getting pedantic is pointless in that moment.
The word "admit" conveys a context of "fault". If you're going to say a similar thing about the landscape admitting to something then I'd be callimg you crazy, yeah.
The ai psychosis in this case it's specifically because of the used word.
Same story as with words like "love" etc
> Confess or acknowledge: Agreeing that a fact, mistake, or crime is real.
And I can see were really barreling down the road of stupidity on this comment chain with one person being more idiotic then the next
What got me was "I keep seeing the same shape next to billing events in other people's reports".
Clicked off after that.
I'm extremely bullish on AI, but I am tired of people not using their own words. Is everyone so insecure about the personality they project in writing that they need to replace it with some AI bullshit?
(To the author: if you didn't do this, which I accept is a possibility, I'm sorry -- you've been caught by the storm of fatigue that has plagued us due to those who do replace their words with AI crap)
Hmm. You are making a good point, and I wouldn’t give the benefit of the doubt to this post’s author. But you can’t just unsee “this is twice load bearing”. Some people will wonder if it’s a training, self-reinforcing feedback artifact. For others, it will work like a memetic virus[^1].
The paradoxical thing is that those of us who have English as a second language should have an easier time producing non-AI-English by the mere act of directly writing what we want to write.
I am catching myself distrusting what people write ever so often. I've got cases of e-mails I'm CC'ed in and I am left wondering: "Has this person always written like this? Is this just an angle in this specific thread (e.g. for sales purposes)? Or are they really relying so much on what the blandness-machine spits out? Am I going mad and wielding my hammer looking for everything in the ....shape (eheh)...of a nail?"
Actually, now that I've written that, it's clear I need to have a talk with some people....sigh...
Yes, I did think about that possibility. Using a tool to translate to english doesn't mean we don't proofread it.
Ok, I hear you: one could argue that they simply don't realize this is a very non-idiomatic way of writing precisely because english isn't their first language. And that simply giving a preamble "sorry, my english comes from a translation tool, excuse any mistakes" would seem obtuse next to every english text they write.
Ok, I'll concede that. In which case I just have to accept the fact that, perhaps, if LLMs don't solve the problem of writing like garbage, and people keep using them to translate, a bunch of us will simply not want to read what you translate because it reads terribly and messes my brain up.
However, I find it hard to believe that an LLM would translate anything they've written into such a clear LLM trope. I would find it much more believable that they simply brainstormed to an LLM in their language and had the LLM build (at least that part of) the article from it. Even if they proofread it, since english is not their language, it slipped by. Either way, in this hypothetical scenario, the LLM was still used to write (at least a part of) the article, not just translate it.
I also find it somewhat hard to believe that someone who I believe is a developer (and has been using claude for a very long time) does not know enough of both english and claude to identify this specific pattern in the text they are putting their own name to it.
So, sure, maybe the author doesn't predominantly write in english or interact with claude in english, and they did write everything and simply piped it through an LLM to get a translation and, after proofreading the best they could, just didn't notice that.
Alternatively, maybe they just don't give a fuck, something which I can absolutely respect. They lose a reader (at least for now), but stand by what makes sense to them and I genuinely don't think less of them because of it -- I just can't read what they produce. I _would_ probably think less of them if I had to work every day with them and this were a repeated pattern of interaction, but that's not what's being discussed at all.
(Disclaimer: English isn't my first language either, which I think also does come across)
And? I’d rather reader poorly written English written by a person about his actual experience - or just read nothing at all - as opposed to reading thinking and writing that has been outsourced to a machine. Being able to think and write confers privileges on those who can do both; the idea that somebody should be able to benefit by doing neither is pretty fucking perverse.
They claimed these problems LONG before agents were the new thing. To my eye it started with the bullshit around GPT-2, and that was in 2019, 7 years ago.
Selling something desirable has been an incentive since year dot
But this reminds me of the black mirror episode of a female that needs a subscription to live and the company keeps increasing and restricting the subscription
s7e1 Common People - the parasitic corporation is called Rivermind, and the sales rep is someone who's life was saved by the corporation.
I thought the same thing when reading this.
If big tech has taught us anything over the past couple of decades, it is that: for corporations (the first unaligned AGIs): if a perverse incentive exists, it will eventually be exploited for profit.
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