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The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever.

No matter how much investors and tech companies want you to believe that they are on the verge of super intelligence, nothing I've seen to date can not easily be explained by "correlation engine", including the "novel" math solutions, all of which appear to just be "a composition of solutions humans have developed and documented elsewhere" upon deeper inspection.

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I just can't accept that it possesses no intelligence. It is not equivalent to human intelligence, obviously, but how can a system without some semblance of rational thinking solve open math problems? Even composing earlier human work into something novel requires intelligence and understanding on some level.
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It has no semantic depth. The sentences and the paragraphs are a statistically viable derivation of existing human text, but once you try to grasp the whole thing with its temporal and spatial dimensions, you are left with a blurry mess that rots your brain. It's a polished, inoffensive and shallow interpretation as written by an opinionated reputation-seeking user of Quora, circa 2019.
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It's just filled to the brim with relations between things. It's good at searching a very large meaning space and create correlations. What it does is to cover great distances and find related things in that large space which needs a long time and large corpus of knowledge to find the connection.

This is not intelligence. It's just a good correlation engine with a very big albeit lossy database of things.

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The very fact that it is able to search within a meaning-space demonstrates that it understands semantics, to some extent. Philosophically, that is profound, for something that is just one big matrix multiplication. Drawing connections between things in meaning-space is surely a facet of intelligence.
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watch this and see if you think it has intelligence by the end

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUicaho5k8

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I wonder if you went back before we had any idea how the brain worked and talked to the smartest people about how neurons work (without giving away that it's a human brain) then asked them all "would such a system be intelligent?" how many would say yes.

The main problem I have with people stating it's not intelligent or conscious is I don't think we even have a good definition of either word that satisfies everyone. Philosophers have been trying (and failing) to elegantly define these things forever and everyone out here proclaiming they've got the definitive answer and this specific thing they're seeing doesn't fit under it.

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This looks interesting, but would you mind saying a sentence or two about why before I commit to an hour-long video? It looks like it shows how they work internally, which is sort of a non sequitur. Brains also work mechanistically. I'm claiming that any system which is able to do what AIs do must necessarily have some sort of intelligence.
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I also like this: https://laurentiugabriel.github.io/token-town/

It shows internals of an LLM nicely, simplified manner.

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Some of it the effect of tells. “It’s not X, it’s Y” is not a bad pattern but it was baked into the instruction following training set just like the other patterns. I catch myself about to use it and use something else because I want to look human. I have, a few times, tried to use AI to write something that I was struggling to find the words and I just didn’t like how it didn’t seem like my voice. If there was just one person doing it would be OK but when it is 100s of blog posts submitted to HN a day it is like wearing a “I’m an NPC” t-shirt.
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Thank you for helping me keep my sanity.
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Do you have much exposure to pre-AI corporate memos, mission statements, marketing plans, or white papers? Because they were mostly written in that style. Full of buzzwords, cliche similes, platitudes, jargon and stock phrases.
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The thing is, people writing them had a style. Every company has its own style, or feeling for these kinds of texts. Also for the initiated, these buzzword-filled blocks of text provided some between the lines information; sometimes big, sometimes small.

AI generated text doesn't have this. Every model has its bias towards a certain style, an overly agreeable tone, some exaggeration to make the user important and smart, but the text has none of the information crumb these pre-AI texts contained.

Even when you use tools like Grammarly and allow it to "Impact-MAXX" your text, the resulting text is a bland wall of letters, carrying none of your voice or style, less elegant than a corporate text and emptier than space.

It's beyond bland. It's tasteless.

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AI tries to make the prose "interesting". I don't want to read interesting prose. I want to read interesting ideas.
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The prose is not only interesting, also glorious. Gloriously grandiose, monumentally empty at the same time.

It's like a hook of a pop song. Interesting to listen, but entirely empty.

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For some research I looked up some very old Reddit threads a couple of days ago.

And, Oh my god, you can actually see how this style of writing influenced AI writing today, I constantly had to remind myself: "this was posted before ChatGPT released".

The reddit influence is especially true for "storytelling" writing.

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Are you sure you are not doing the same thing with other texts?

I started to skim a lot more text due to me having read a lot. Like in news article, i stoped reading the first paragraph because it repeats just what it was already written in the short subtext. Then there is the second paragarph which is used to have some historical view or whatever it is.

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I started skimming reports im required to produce quarterly snd annually. I designed them to provide novel information at start and end so I can update them easily.

The problem I encounter is both my memory is degrading, but since these reports are largely duplicative, knowing which version im remembering is technically impossible since theres so much overlap. The overlap is tge same problem as context poisoning.

Id been doing this for over a decade when i started working with a new engineer with a few years of experience and younger. I tried to explain how i set these docs up so they can be skimmed and you can update the specific facts needed. They exclaimed they would never skim and rewrite it all. There was zero way to explain how exhausting that will become as they age.

So theres certain a tension about how people and AI will generate documents.

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> There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here".

I think you need to self-correct here, because otherwise you'll be ineffective in an information setting, where I expect AI-generated resources will not only be the norm, they will absolutely swamp the environment.

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> my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text

I bet it does. I bet it also recognizes some human text as AI text, and doesn't detect other AI text.

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Show me AI text that manages to climb out of the uncanny valley, and I'll show you AI text that's been edited by a human.
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The problem is the well's been poisoned just by the fact that I know this is AI trying to hide AI, so I'm already poised to look at the examples and declare "aha! this is obviously AI!"
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yes, but now I’m also experiencing that for human-written text
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Once you see past the illusion I think there’s no going back. AI writing style is just dogshit. This hype wave is based on the belief that we’re inching closer to AGI but seems to me we just increasingly struggle to define intelligence. LLMs seem smart because they can pump out thousands of LOC quickly, and enthral you with fancy words and bullet points. I don’t fall for the intelligence illusion anymore.
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> Something is deeply wrong with AI generated output

It works just fine for me.

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You are absolutely right.
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haha this made me laugh
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That's not funny, it's serious!
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