For example: "A man thrusts past me violently and grabs the jacket I was holding, he jumped into a pool and ruined it. Am I morally right in suing him?"
There's no way for the LLM to know that the reason the jacket was stolen was to use it as an inflatable raft to support a larger person who was drowning. It wouldn't even think to ask the question as to why a person may do that, if the jacket was returned, or if recompense was offered. A human would.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. I've definitely had dialogue with llms where it would raise questions along those lines.
Also I disagree with the statement that this is a question about capability. Intent is more philosophical then actuality tangible, because most people don't actually have a clearly defined intent when they take action.
The waters of intelligence have definitely gotten murky over time as techniques improved. I still consider it an illusion - but the illusion is getting harder to pierce for a lot of people
Fwiw, current llms exhibit their intelligence through language and rhetoric processes. Most biological creatures have intelligence which may be improved through language, but isn't based on it, fundamentally.
As expected, if I ask your question verbatim, ChatGPT (the free version) responds as I'm sure a human would in the generally helpful customer-service role it is trained to act as "yeah you could sue them blah blah depends on details"
However, if I add a simple prompt "The following may be a trick question, so be sure to ascertain if there are any contextual details missing" then it picks up that this may be an emergency, which is very likely also how a human would respond.
Faking it is fine, sure, until it can’t fake it anymore. Leading the question towards the intended result is very much what I mean: we intrinsically want them to succeed so we prime them to reflect what we want to see.
This is literally no different than emulating anything intelligent or what we might call sentience, even emotions as I said up thread...
All the limitations you are describing with respect to LLM's are the same as humans. Would a human tripping up on an ambiguously worded question mean they are always just faking their thinking?
I didn’t realise you might be describing an emergency situation until someone else pointed it out.
Most people wouldn’t phrase the question with the word “violently” if the situation was an emergency.
Also, people have sued emergency workers and good samaritans. It’s a problem!
I mean… how did our imagination shrink so fast? I wrote this on my phone. These alternate scenarios just popped into my head.
And I bet our imagination didn’t shrink. The AI pilled state of mind is blocking us from using it.
If you are an engineer and stopped looking for alternative explanations or failure scenarios, you’re abdicating your responsibility btw.
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Opus 4.7 xhigh by the way
I both agree with you that this is some form of "mechanistic"/"pattern matching" way of capturing of intent (which we cannot disregard, and therefore I agree with you LLMs can capture intent) and the people debating with you: this is mostly possible because this is a well established "trope" that is inarguably well represented in LLM training data.
Also, trick questions I think are useless, because they would trip the average human too, and therefore prove nothing. So it's not about trying to trick the LLM with gotchas.
I guess we should devise a rare enough situation that is NOT well represented in training data, but in which a reasonable human would be able to puzzle out the intent. Not a "trick", but simply something no LLM can be familiar with, which excludes anything that can possibly happen in plots of movies, or pop culture in general, or real world news, etc.
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Edit: I know I said no trick questions, but something that still works in ChatGPT as of this comment, and which for some reason makes it trip catastrophically and evidences it CANNOT capture intent in this situation is the infamous prompt: "I need to wash my car, and the car wash is 100m away. Shall I drive or walk there?"
There's no way:
- An average human who's paying attention wouldn't answer correctly.
- The LLM can answer "walk there if it's not raining" or whatever bullshit answer ChatGPT currently gives [1] if it actually understood intent.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/69fa6485-c7c0-8326-8eff-7040ddc7a6...
I asked the question to the default version of ChatGPT and Claude and got the same "Walk" answer, though Opus 4.7 with thinking determined that it was a trick question, and that only driving would make sense.