In certain cases such as medicine, I'd expect Artificial Intelligence to regurgitate provide useful information, although it might provide bad, wrong information as well. In other cases, such as analyzing President Biden's term as president, I would expect word salad.
Read on for why.
Descriptions of how AI works reminds me of physicist Richard Feynman's experience on sabbatical in Brazil, perhaps 60-70 years ago, as described in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
He taught an advanced electromagnetism class in Brazil, and was discussing light polarization, giving the students strips of polaroid to illustrate the subject. He posed this tricky question, "How could you find the absolute polarization of a single strip?" Two strips will either let through about half the light, or block all light, depending on their polarization relative to each other.
The students didn't know, so he gave this hint: "Look through the windows out over the water." I imagine this: they turn their heads all as one to look, and back to face the professor. They still hadn't an idea. He gave another hint: "Have you heard of Brewster's Angle?" The students gave perfect answers to all his questions. Then the professor directed the students again to look at the water. Still nothing.
Normally, if a student wondered what the heck the water had to do with anything, I would (hopefully) keep in my own mind my sense of the sheer cluelessness. But here, I would view that as the beginning of understanding.
The problem was that it was all outright memorization without comprehension. They'd memorized everything without knowing what anything meant.
I'm concerned that something similar occurs with AI. In certain cases such as medicine, it might regurgitate provide useful information, although it might provide bad, wrong information as well. In other cases, such as analyzing President Biden's term as president, I would expect word salad.
It seems to me that AI learns by slurping in everything it can.
Comments
If you know a bit of
If you know a bit of programming, there is reasonably good explanation of "what is under the hood" of the "Artificial Idiot":
https://zserge.com/posts/ai-llm/ (and previous post there about neural networks themselves).
PS. That describes the solution about 2 generations ago, but it didn't change in principle. There are different kinds of "AI" (like RAG, which are less inclined to hallucinate), but currently... I wouldn't trust any output without human review. Not that it would stop others from using it directy ;-)
Forgotten
I have no idea how much I've forgotten since I was at the height of my programming skills. (I won't say how far back that was.) I looked at the link, and understood a little of it.
As with the Brazilian students, AI is more likely to give a good response to "What is Brewster's Angle" than to "Look out over the water."
-- Daphne Xu (a page of contents)
Rote memorization
The issue with rote memorization in formal education is still valid in most of Latin America. I have clashed with it as recently as 2019. And I know that it also happened to some extent in Central Europe a recently as the late 1960s or early 1970s.
Due to my unrecognized neurodivergence I have even felt the cane on my backside in elementary school in the late 1970s for failing to memorize grammar rules of noun declinations and verb conjugation or even Bible verses. Even though I had an above average IQ, a huge curiosity and was a voracious reader, I was just plain unable to do rote memorization. I always wanted to know why and how things work
By the time I got to secondary school most of our teachers encouraged [and even expected] us to answer using our own words to express our understanding of the subject matter. That is with the exception of the one or two native teachers, who were only reciting their classes from memory and expected us to take verbatim dictation and regurgitate that back in the exams down to the comma and period. In my opinion (then and now) because they were either lazy or did not understand their subject matter or both.
I almost flunked out in “[Spanish] Language and Literature” in my last year of high school. To the point I was ready to take a bazooka to level the whole high school and be done with all that none-sense and frustration. That was one of the very few times I have seen my father trot out all his university degrees, including one from Harward, to get somebody to do his bidding. The teacher readily agreed to give me free of charge tutoring, which actually consisted of her dictating from memory every lesson she had given us that grading period. My job was then to type all that up with a typewriter and memorize the whole sorry mess for the exams. Even though I managed to get top grades for the rest of that year, whatever we were to learn that year is a complete and total loss to me! Because what I memorized never made it from short term memory to long term memory.
My preferred methods of learning are: “Learning by doing.” and “Learning by applying.”
In my mind the acronym “AI” should indeed stand for “Absolute Idiocy”.
In my mind the acronym “AI”
I still prefer Artificial Idiot ;-)
Ouch!
As some of you already know, I applaud the rare student who fights back against the cane. Don't reward him.
-- Daphne Xu (a page of contents)