We probably don’t want to use the current leader in cause of death for kids as a template for good policy.

If you do the search I suggested you will find relevant reviews immediately. If you add keywords based on my post text you will find the primary sources immediately.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm

Teenage suicide rates were declining for over a decade, especially in males. Now they are increasing in both males and females. You would have to be a complete monster to not want to study, understand, and reverse this trend.

Go to pubmed. Type “social media mental health”. Read the studies, or the reviews if you don’t have the time.

The average American teenager spends 4.8 hours/day on social media. Increased use of social media is associated with increased rates of depression, eating disorders, body image dissatisfaction, and externalizing problems. These studies don’t show causation, but guess what, we literally cannot show causation in most human studies because of ethics.

Social media drastically alters peer interactions, with negative interactions (bullying) associated with increased rates of self harm, suicide, internalizing and externalizing problems.

Mobile phone use alone is associated with sleep disruption and daytime sleepiness.

Looking forward to your peer-reviewed critiques of these studies claiming they are all “just vibes.”

This is a health issue, not a morality issue.

What do you mean by work? Do they stop everyone from doing stupid things? No. Do they have a measurable effect on behavior? Yes.

I remember hearing this argument before…about the Internet. Glad that fad went away.

As it has always been, these technologies are being used to push us forward by teams of underpaid unnamed researchers with no interest in profit. Meanwhile you focus on the scammers and capitalists and unload your wallets to them, all while complaining about the lack of progress as measured by the products you see in advertisements.

Luckily, when you get that cancer diagnosis or your child is born with some rare disease, that progress will attend to your needs despite your ignorance if it.

How do hallucinations preclude an internal representation? Couldn’t hallucinations arise from a consistent internal representation that is not fully aligned with reality?

I think you are misunderstanding the role of tokens in LLMs and conflating them with internal representation. Tokens are used to generate a state, similar to external stimuli. The internal representation, assuming there is one, is the manner in which the tokens are processed. You could say the same thing about human minds, that the representation is not located anywhere like a piece of data; it is the manner in which we process stimuli.

My thesis is that we are asserting the lack of human-like qualities in AIs that we cannot define or measure. Assertions should be made on data, not uneasy feelings arising when an LLM falls into the uncanny valley.

I think where you are going wrong here is assuming that our internal perception is not also a hallucination by your definition. It absolutely is. But our minds are embodied, thus we are able check these hallucinations against some outside stimulus. Your gripe that current LLMs are unable to do that is really a criticism of the current implementations of AI, which are trained on some data, frozen, then restricted from further learning by design. Imagine if your mind was removed from all stimulus and then tested. That is what current LLMs are, and I doubt we could expect a human mind to behave much better in such a scenario. Just look at what happens to people cut off from social stimulus; their mental capacities degrade rapidly and that is just one type of stimulus.

Another problem with your analysis is that you expect the AI to do something that humans cannot do: cite sources without an external reference. Go ahead right now and from memory cite some source for something you know. Do not Google search, just remember where you got that knowledge. Now who is the one that cannot cite sources? The way we cite sources generally requires access to the source at that moment. Current LLMs do not have that by design. Once again, this is a gripe with implementation of a very new technology.

The main problem I have with so many of these “AI isn’t really able to…” arguments is that no one is offering a rigorous definition of knowledge, understanding, introspection, etc in a way that can be measured and tested. Further, we just assume that humans are able to do all these things without any tests to see if we can. Don’t even get me started on the free will vs illusory free will debate that remains unsettled after centuries. But the crux of many of these arguments is the assumption that humans can do it and are somehow uniquely able to do it. We had these same debates about levels of intelligence in animals long ago, and we found that there really isn’t any intelligent capability that is uniquely human.

Except the most relevant part: it is owned by a hostile foreign government.

I’m still gaming on my 1080ti. One of the fans has a mind of its own and accelerates/decelerates randomly, but I remain impressed with the settings it can run on modern games.

TikTok enacted a very obvious influence campaign to fight this legislation that resulted in congressional phone lines becoming jammed. So what China can do is directly influence our laws.

It would be if McCarthy’s hearings were full of actual KGB agents.

This is a difficult issue to deal with, but I think the problem lies with our current acceptance of photographs as an objective truth. If a talented writer places someone in an erotic text, we immediately know that this is a product of imagination. If a talented artist sketches up a nude of someone, we can immediately recognize that this is a product of imagination. We have laws around commercial use of likenesses, but I don’t think we would make those things illegal.

But now we have photographs that are products of imagination. I don’t have a solution for this specific issue, but we all need to calibrate how we establish trust with persons and information now that photographs, video, speech, etc can be faked by AI. I can even imagine a scenario in the not-too-distant future where face-to-face conversation cannot be immediately trusted due to advances in robotics or other technologies.

Lying and deception are human nature, and we will always employ any new technologies for these purposes along with any good they may bring. We will always have to carefully adjust the line on what is criminal vs artistic vs non-criminal depravity.

But you are not reporting the underlying probability, just the guess. There is no way, then, to distinguish a bad guess from a good guess. Let’s take your example and place a fully occluded shape. Now the most probable guess could still be a full circle, but with a very low probability of being correct. Yet that guess is reported with the same confidence as your example. When you carry out this exercise for all extrapolations with full transparency of the underlying probabilities, you find yourself right back in the position the original commenter has taken. If the original data does not provide you with confidence in a particular result, the added extrapolations will not either.