Far too many people believe the statements that we see about AI that
imply
that the software can think, when in reality it just strings words together
in plausible sequences.
The very term "Artificial Intelligence" is a misnomer; the software is
incapable of thinking, only responding to the text of its prompts, and
sometimes the response is completely wrong.
The issue is more fundamental than whether it can distinguish between
"libre"
and "gratis;" it doesn't think, so doesn't distinguish.
Leslie
On 2025-04-27 21:30:55 Akira Urushibata wrote:
> The Osaka Expo opened on April 13. In search of news of the event I
> consulted Google search (in Japanese). Google replied in the ordinary
> way, with the URL of the official Expo site on top followed by news
> items, images and such. Among them, on the first page was a rather
> new field which listed "related questions". The first of them was a
> great surprise. It read:
>
> "For what reason(s) was the 2025 Osaka Expo canceled?"
>
> Other items of the list discussed ticket prices, access to the
> grounds. Obviously the above text was generated by AI, for it is
> unlikely for a human being to err in this manner, but Google does not
> clarify. (Confirmed April 28 Japan time) So, one part of Google
> (probably AI) treats the exposition as canceled while another part
> understands that it is in progress. There is a failure to notice
> an obvious contradiction.
>
> Can AI distinguish between "free" as in "free drinks" and "free" as in
> "freedom"? We should watch out for this. The above makes me think
> that we should not expect much. Even if we observe AI getting the
> distinction right in a number of cases we should not expect it to be
> always correct.
>
> For one thing many people are confused and much has been written
> based on the mistake. it is unreasonable to expect that none of the
> erroneous material has been fed to the large language model (LLM)
> neural networks for training. In addition the above example
> indicates that AI is not good at coping with lack of integrity.
> Perhaps a contradiction which is obvious to a human being is not
> so for AI.
>
> ---
>
> Related article: Researchers have found methods to investigate what is
> going on inside the neural networks that power AI. They have
> discovered that the process differs greatly from human reasoning.
>
> We Now Know How AI 'Thinks'--and It's Barely Thinking at All
> https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/now-know-ai-thinks-barely-010000603.html
>
> Though I don't follow developments in this field closely, what is
> written in this article confirms my suspicions.
>
> Another way to see this is that the AI developers now have the
> equivalent of a debugger which allows them to probe the internal
> process. This is likely to affect development.
>
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