Post #4143562

Replies (1)

• @luciferofastora@feddit.org 2026-07-20 12:59

  It’s not a philosophical quibble, but a technical limit with a dangerous social implication. Ascribing human traits its technology doesn’t support is a dangerous deception that cons people into trusting it in ways they really shouldn’t. To put it bluntly: LLMs don’t understand ethics. They don’t understand anything. That’s not what they’re made for. They’re highly complex and technically impressive text generators iteratively evaluating a context of preceding tokens to predict, select and append subsequent ones, which then become part of that context for the next iteration. Essentially, they’re very good at guessing what a human-like response might be. However, that context bias makes them susceptible to following their prompter into what we might consider unsavoury territory. You might implement some filtering mechanisms to curb known topics, but you’d only be playing whack-a-mole with certain symptoms, not addressing the fact that they have no understanding of semantics. The reason they “hallucinate” is that they don’t even know what’s real. They don’t know the actual concepts these sequences of bytes are supposed to represent. They’re much better than us at correlating language with language, but not with reality. It they don’t know that it’s critical for one sequence of bytes to exactly match some second sequence of bytes to be a valid citation, and that the preceding bytes need to correlate with some bytes associated with that second sequence in a certain way for the pattern of a citation to make sense as a citation. That’s the reason everything now has warnings about double-checking the output: we all know it’s unreliable. To suggest that it could be reliable in some specific way is disingenuous and irresponsible. To pretend that it can be held to a human standard of morality is outright bullshit.

  Open ##4171695