I used to be freely optimistic about humanity, now it’s becoming more and more forced. The percentage of people who are naturally kool-aid drinkers appears to have remained fairly constant over time, but AI will change that, the shadows will multiply. There’ll be shadows of shadows. Shadows all day. Shadows in the way, even when you’re searching for the light, trying to do right.
I guess it’s the complete lack of any intentionality, if I were to try and describe it better. It’s just so apparent that, well, here I am submitting an Ask HN trying to understand. I hope I’m not coming across as flippant, I don’t mean to, it’s genuine curiosity, I just don’t understand how anyone could defend their position that any LLM ‘passes’.
It appears you don’t believe any pass the test. I’m more trying to ask of someone who does believe they pass, ‘how can you?’ To me it’s one of those things that‘s so painstakingly obvious that the inherent limitations of words comes into play when trying to describe it.
They can pass or fail depending on how they're configured.
The default configuration is easy to spot.
It's easy to change that configuration and make them hard to spot.
The default style, that is easy to spot, is also a style that actual real humans use, leading to false positives. I myself have been accused of being a LLM here on this site, just from my style.
I guess I disagree. The ‘easy to spot’ never goes away, regardless of configuration, so long as the conversation continues. In the spirit of this site, good-faith intellectual curiosity, I will refrain from continuing this conversation in a manner which would reveal your nature as a human or not, and remove the hint of taste of that palpable irony from my mouth (I joke) but it wouldn’t add anything to the discussion anyway. But it would be trivial. Am I making any sense?
Yes, you personally. Do you believe you could be fooled by any LLM, unable to ascertain if the words came a human or not? By simply asking questions and getting responses?
We can be a Socrates anywhere. We don't have to literally be on trial for "corrupting the youth" to exercise reason and pursue virtue. We can strive to live well on even quotidian place like the workplace or our local communities. In fact that's where much of the drama of the philosophical life unfolds. I wasn't saying that Stoicism pointed me in the direction of a lucrative career but that it encouraged me to ask myself how I can lead a better life for others, and that involved finding work that I loved and that could provide for my family. So no, I don't think Socrates would become a SWE for the typical reasons why people jump into this industry. But there is nothing in his thought that suggests to me that he would above doing meaningful, intellectually enriching work that would enable to help to contribute to his community and to support those he loved.
I think you're right, although I think he would feel the allure of software and probably write software. He faulted writing with the decline of memory and resulting in the pretense of understanding vs True understanding.
