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submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Archive link: https://archive.ph/GtA4Q

The complete destruction of Google Search via forced AI adoption and the carnage it is wreaking on the internet is deeply depressing, but there are bright spots. For example, as the prophecy foretold, we are learning exactly what Google is paying Reddit $60 million annually for. And that is to confidently serve its customers ideas like, to make cheese stick on a pizza, “you can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue” to pizza sauce, which comes directly from the mind of a Reddit user who calls themselves “Fucksmith” and posted about putting glue on pizza 11 years ago.

A joke that people made when Google and Reddit announced their data sharing agreement was that Google’s AI would become dumber and/or “poisoned” by scraping various Reddit shitposts and would eventually regurgitate them to the internet. (This is the same joke people made about AI scraping Tumblr). Giving people the verbatim wisdom of Fucksmith as a legitimate answer to a basic cooking question shows that Google’s AI is actually being poisoned by random shit people say on the internet.

Because Google is one of the largest companies on Earth and operates with near impunity and because its stock continues to skyrocket behind the exciting news that AI will continue to be shoved into every aspect of all of its products until morale improves, it is looking like the user experience for the foreseeable future will be one where searches are random mishmashes of Reddit shitposts, actual information, and hallucinations. Sundar Pichai will continue to use his own product and say “this is good.”

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[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Is this real though? Does ChatGPT just literally take whole snippets of texts like that? I thought it used some aggregate or probability based on the whole corpus of text it was trained on.

[-] [email protected] 35 points 1 month ago

It does, but the thing with the probability is that it doesn't always pick the most likely next bit of text, it basically rolls dice and picks maybe the second or third or in rare cases hundredth most likely continuation. This chaotic behaviour is part of what makes it feel "intelligent" and why it's possible to reroll responses to the same prompt.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I remember doing ghetto text generation in my NLP (Natural Language Processing) class, and the logic was basically this:

  1. Associate words with a probability number - e.g. given the word "math": "homework" has 25% chance, "class" has 20% chance, etc; these probabilities are generated from the training data
  2. Generate a random number to decide which word to pick next - average roll gives likely response, less likely roll gives less likely response
  3. Repeat for as long as you need to generate text

This is a rough explanation of Baysian nets, which I think are what's used in LLMs. We used a very simple n-gram model (e.g. n words are considered for the statistics, e.g. "to my math" is much more likely to generate "class" than "homework"), but they're probably doing fancy things with text categorization and whatnot to generate more relevant text.

The LLM isn't really "thinking" here, it's just associating input text and the training data to generate output text.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Sounds quite similar to Markov chains which made me think of this story:

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-automated-curse-generator

Still gets a snort out of me every time Markov chains are mentioned.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yup, and I'm guessing LLMs use Markov chains, which are also a really old concept (the idea is >100 years old, and it's used in compression algorithms like LZMA).

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this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
1850 points (98.7% liked)

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