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Comment by thomastjeffery | Hacker News Reader

I think it would be more clear to say, "ChatGPT assembled a fake data set as a continuation to scientific hypothesis".

ChatGPT does not generate data. It reassembles the data (text) it was given, including the text in its training corpus.

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I don't think that's accurate, it generates novel outputs that were not observed in the training data.

It doesn't generate new tokens.

Train an LLM on text that only uses lowercase, and it will never output an uppercase letter.

So the model is limited to using words and characters that already exist. I agree with you but I don't see why is a limitation worth pointing out.

you literally have to put in every number for it to do mathematics correctly...

its as stupid as that. some try to get around it by indeed only having the 10 different digits and glue them together, but its a hallucination that that works.

an important point in generalization is for example that you teach it something. This is literally important

'ycombinator is a website' is a prompt that is almost impossible of ycombinator is not in your training set

But can it put two tokens together

10 01 = 1001?

Would you say the same about all systems that are considered "generative"?

Probably.

It's easy to mistake entropy for novelty. Computers don't create: they compute. Calling an LLM "Artificial Intelligence" is a bit like mistaking a pseudorandom number generator for true noise.

I think that by that same logic, you could say human artists, writers, etc. don't create either, they just move existing matter (which typically isn't created nor destroyed) from one place to another. You could also say an electric company doesn't generate electricity but merely converts other energy into it -- one of the most popular uses of the word "generator" yet the atoms/energy are already here; we just arrange/convert and call it generation. I must insist that sorting some things a certain way is widely known as generation/creation.

I can see how other words are a bit more precise, though. Synthesize, perhaps?

We think objectively about it. We have goals and intentions. We use logic. LLMs don't.

The dirt in the ground sorts impurities from water, but we don't call it intelligent or generative. We call it entropy.

This is a human supremacy argument, essentially claiming that because we have a "soul" or because of something inherent in us that cannot be proven we are better than something else. You are free to believe this, but it is a matter of faith. Not of any sort of reasoning.

Yep. I'm not much of a religious person, but if I were, I might say: not only does AI not create stuff, humans don't either, only the Creator did! I suppose the big bang theory doesn't stray far from this either. Point is, maybe we use this notion metaphorically/imprecisely even for human output, and therefore we might as well extend it to machines.

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