by shagie | 2025-11-20 23:50:58+00:00
The challenge is: for someone who is convinced that an LLM is only presenting material that they've seen before that was created by some human, how do you show them something that hasn't been seen before?

(Digging in old chats one from 2024 this one is amusing ... https://chatgpt.com/share/af1c12d5-dfeb-4c76-a74f-f03f48ce3b... was a fun one - epic rap battle between Paul Graham and Commander Taco )

Many people seem to believe that the LLM is not much more than a collage of words that it stole from other places and likewise images are a collage of images stolen from other people's pictures. (I've had people on reddit (which tends to be rather AI hostile outside of specific AI subs) downvote me for explaining how to use an LLM as an editor for your own writing or pointing out that some generative image systems are built on top of libraries where the company had rights (e.g. stock photography) to all the images)

With the wizards, I'm not interested necessarily in the correct solution, but rather how it did it and what the representation of the response was. I selected everything with 'W' to see how it handled identifying the different things.

As to riddles... that's really a question of mind reading. Your riddle isn't one that I can solve. Maybe if you told me the answer I'd understand how you got from the answer to the question, but I've got no idea how to go from the hint to a possible answer (does that make me an LLM?)

I feel its a question much more along some other classic riddles...

“What have I got in my pocket?" he said aloud. He was talking to himself, but Gollum thought it was a riddle, and he was frightfully upset. "Not fair! not fair!" he hissed. "It isn't fair, my precious, is it, to ask us what it's got in its nassty little pocketsess?”

What do I have in my pocket? (and then a bit of "what would it do with that prompt?") https://chatgpt.com/s/t_691fa7e9b49081918a4ef8bdc6accb97

At this point, I'm much more of the opinion that some people are on "team anti-ai" and that it has become part of their identity to be against anything that makes use of AI to augment what a human can do unaided. Attempting to show that it's not a stochastic parrot or next token predictors (anymore than humans are) or that it can do things that help people (when used responsibly by the human) gets met with hostility.

I believe that this comes from the group identity and some of the things of group dynamics. https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownw...

> The second basic pattern that Bion detailed is the identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the open source movement in the mid-1990s could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.

> ...

> Nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy. So even if someone isn’t really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate toward members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.