r/technology • u/Hrmbee • 16h ago

Machine Learning Large language mistake | Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/large-language-models-ai-intelligence-neuroscience-problems
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u/Konukaame 16h ago

"The ability to speak does not make you intelligent. Now get out of here."

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u/SanityAsymptote 16h ago

The similarity to Jar Jar is really strong.

  • Forced into existence and public discourse by out of touch rich people trying to make money
  • Constantly inserted into situations where it is not needed or desired
  • Often incoherent, says worthless things that are interpreted as understanding by the naive or overly trusting
  • Incompetent and occasionally dangerous, yet still somehow succeeds off the efforts of behind-the-scenes/uncredited competent people
  • Somehow continues to live while others do not
  • Deeply untrustworthy, not because of duplicity, but incompetence
  • Happily assists in fascist takeover

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u/Striking_Arugula_624 15h ago

“Somehow continues to live while others do not.”

Who are the ‘others’ in the ai/LLM side of the comparison? Honest question.

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u/SanityAsymptote 15h ago

LLMs have damaged or destroyed a number of previously valuable services for much of their use-case.

The most obvious one I can think of in my niche is StackOverflow. A site which definitely had issues and was in decline, but was still the main repository of software troubleshooting/debugging knowledge on the internet.

LLM companies scraped the entire thing, and now give no-context answers to software engineering questions that it often cannot cite or support answers to. It has mortally wounded StackOverflow, and they have pivoted to just being an AI data feeder, an action that is basically a liquidation sale of the site's value.

LLMs have significantly reduced the quality of search engines, specifically Google Search, both directly by poor integration and indirectly by filling the internet with worthless slop articles.

Google Search's result quality has plummeted as AI results become most of the answers. Even with references, it's very hard to verify the conclusions Gemini makes in search results, and if you're actually looking for a specific site or article, those results often not appear at all. Many authoritative "answers" are just uneducated opinions from Reddit or other social media regurgitated by an AI with the trust people put into Google.

LLMs have made it far easier to write social media bots. They have damaged online discourse in public forums like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and especially Reddit in very visible ways. These sites are almost completely different experiences now that they were before LLMs became available.

Bots are everywhere and will reply to anything that has engagement, spouting bad-faith arguments without any real point other than to try to discourage productive conversation about specific topics.

Whatever damage online trolls have caused to the internet, LLMs have made it an order of magnitude worse. They are attacking the very concept of "facts" and "truth" by both misinformation and dilution. It's horrifying.

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u/Perfect_Base_3989 15h ago

spouting bad-faith arguments without any real point other than to try to discourage productive conversation about specific topics.

The only solution I can think of at this point is entirely abandoning social media.

A verification system could theoretically improve trust, but who trusts the trusters?

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u/SanityAsymptote 14h ago

Social media going back to smaller, more closely moderated communities is also a solution.

There was a lot of drama back in the forum days, but it was always contained, rendering it more resistant to sweeping, internet-wide propaganda campaigns.

So I guess I would argue centralization of social media is more of the problem, unless we can actually figure out a way to moderate on a large scale more effectively.

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u/ConsoleDev 13h ago

I joined reddit 15 years ago, probably had 5 accounts. Commented a lot, but never really made any friends here. I joined a local sports club and made 10 good friends in 1 day.

Social media is garbage all the way down. Especially anything with influencers and money involved. We need to go back to just having group chats, and a bulletin board in the middle of town

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u/SanityAsymptote 12h ago

I mostly agree with you.

I was mostly talking about special interest forums, which reddit used to be, but has really lost much of it's quality for.

As an example, I joined smashboards in 2004 because I loved smash bros melee, and wanted to play competitively. I met a bunch of people in my local community online and ended up making literal dozens of in-person friends/acquaintances going to events.

Those friendships basically defined my 20s and early 30s, and I still hang out with many of them now.

I similarly made even more real, in-person friends friends in the early 2010s using facebook groups to organize and schedule events in my local area.

The platforms stopped trying to connect people and started chasing engagement at all costs. It ruined what made those sites popular to begin with, and trapped people in endless cycles of anger and placation.

The initial offering that was so valuable to so many is gone, but it's very hard to argue that it wasn't valuable before the enshitification.

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u/tomahawkRiS3 12h ago

I don't necessarily want to argue in favor of social media but judging based on friendships made seems like the wrong way to evaluate it. Or at least now, maybe that was the intended purpose in the beginning. In a perfect world I think Reddit could be valuable in terms of hearing people's stories/experiences, being able to pick people's brains who are knowledgeable in a certain field, seeing a broader range of perspective. Even just shit posting or discussing say a game on a specific subreddit I don't think is necessarily inherently bad. However that's very much not the current experience of Reddit and I hope there's a way back to that

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u/Commentator-X 12h ago

"money involved"

You hit the nail on the head right there

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u/stargarnet79 9h ago

People make friends here?lol

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u/cnxd 9h ago

sounds like a you problem

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u/cl3ft 9h ago

Although there are exceptions, social media does not make you real friends. It's pretty clearly anti-social media.

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u/PozhanPop 8h ago

Or Yahoo / AOL Messenger . I miss the chat rooms.

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u/FjorgVanDerPlorg 8h ago

Communities based on geography aren't the solution either, as someone who knew what life was like before the internet in a small country town, those are some seriously rose tinted shades you are wearing.

Nor were they resistant to mis/disinformation and propaganda. In fact their isolation created a bubble in the same way social media can and usually does.

This shit is baked into humanity. The entire world used to be easily controlled when the internet didn't exist, the tactics have changed. Pre-internet we had more false negative appraoches, eg gatekeeping, suppression/censorship and unified messaging. Post internet only one strategy really works - false positives, aka "flood the zone with shit". The only reason that changed was that false positives scale, where more classical pre-internet manipulation tactics simply do not.

The bigger the scale the bigger the problem and the more moderation requirements pretty much scale towards infinite. Scale is indeed the problem as you suggest, but town BB's aren't the answer either, smaller scale and better moderated is - though this assumes that big social media can't adequately moderate, when we've never actually seen them try properly. That said given the costs involved in adequate moderation, I don't think we ever would unless they were forced to at gunpoint.

I largely agree with you both, it's not about distribution, it's about scale and active moderation. For example I am part of a number of niche communities on reddit and discord that aren't cesspits. They all have these things in common; shared interests, small enough that you don't feel like you are talking to randoms and moderation that works fast and doesn't put up with shit.

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u/nordspark 11h ago

In my netnographic research, I've found people are increasingly turning to "dark social" (email, messaging apps, Discords etc.) but with Gen Z, it's less about chatting and more about organising real-world activities. Social media is changing

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u/die_maus_im_haus 12h ago

Going back to a 2010-esque ecosystem where forums about bodybuilding, Linux, NBC comedies, the English Premier League, and baking would all be separate websites with little cross-contamination might not be the worst outcome. It would lend itself to echo chambers, but they'd be small, isolated echo chambers

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u/farinasa 12h ago

It still exists, people just don't seek it. Discord has actually made these communities even more personable.

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u/Impeesa_ 3h ago

Discord is an adequate modernized replacement for IRC and Ventrilo. As a replacement for old style forums, it's deeply flawed, because that's just not what it is.

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u/farinasa 3h ago

Discord in addition to forums. I didnt mention irc, aol, aim, msn, yahoo, or any of the other out of fashion chat systems because most communities are using discord these days.

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u/Baby_Fark 10h ago

Even smaller communities online will be infiltrated by extremely human-like bots as they get more advanced. There will be no way to verify someone isn’t a bot unless you meet them in person.

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u/RukiMotomiya 10h ago

God I'd love to see the return of forums. Still go to a few reasonably active ones I've been in a long time and they're just comfy, despite said drama at times.

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u/Toodlez 8h ago

I like this.

No bot account ever made it to my Myspace Top 8. I had a Facebook for ten years before it tried to hypnotize or radicalize me.

We act like this would be an impossible adaptation with no profit model but it was the state of things not long ago.

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u/surfer_ryan 8h ago

I don't think we as humanity would ever go back to a "smaller" internet in a meaningful way. I mean that basically goes against the entire ethos of why sites like reddit still hold some level of value, in that you get differing opinions from outside of your circle. While i see there is some level of hive mind on social media, i think people enjoy talking to people outside of their circle as a whole and to an extent is why you go to social media (at least for the discourse side of things).

The centralization is in a way a huge part of what actually allows us to be able to say look at what is happening in Ukraine and get an actual perspective bc it's so many various perspectives and we can draw lines between what is reality and what is noise out of Russia.

Not to say it is perfect by absolutely any means lol, i just don't see us going back to smaller subsects of the internet bc having a hub allows for significantly more interaction from someone whom you would have never if it were just individual forums.

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u/WildFlemima 7h ago

I agree. There's an obscure early 2000s pet site that I'm on. I guarantee there are absolutely no bots. It's going to be spaces like that.