this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

No it's not. It's pedantic and arguing semantics. It is essentially useless and a waste of everyone's time.

It applies a statistical model and returns an analysis.

I've never heard anyone argue when you say they used a computer to analyse it.

It's just the same AI bad bullshit and it's tiring in every single thread about them.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 hours ago

I never made any "AI bad" arguments (in fact, I said that they may be incredibly well suited to this) I just argued for the correct use of words and you hallucinated.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

LLMs arent "bad" (ignoring, of course, the massive content theft necessary to train them), but they are being wildly misused.

"Analysis" is precisely one of those misuses. Grand Theft Autocomplete can't even count, ask it how many 'e's are in "elephant" and you'll get an answer anywhere from 1 to 3.

This is because they do not read or understand, they produce strings of tokens based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next. If prompted for an analysis they'll output something that looks like an analysis, but to determine whether it is accurate or not a human has to do the work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

LLMs cannot:

  • Tell fact from fiction
  • Accurately recall data from its training set
  • Count

LLMs can

  • Translate
  • Get the general vibe of a text (sentiment analysis)
  • Generate plausible text

Semantics aside, they're very different skills that require different setups to accomplish. Just because counting is an easier task than analysing text for humans, doesn't mean it's the same it's the same for a LLM. You can't use that as evidence for its inability to do the "harder" tasks.