AIs on Rs in "strawberry"
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The screenshot I show everyone who tells me they're using AI for anything
— Chris PG | PapaGlitch (@papaglitch.bsky.social) Aug 26, 2024 at 5:20 AM
More, from author John Scalzi and a different LLM:
It's worse than that: You can point out to "AI" that there are three "r"s in Strawberry, and after it disagrees with you, work with it to make it acknowledge the correct number, and then, once it agrees with you, ask it the same question in the same thread and it will give the wrong answer again.
— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) Aug 27, 2024 at 9:44 AM
[Note: "The author of the quoted post has requested their posts not be displayed on external sites" refers to the post John Scalzi quoted, which was therefore omitted from the embedding…]
No strawberries in this one, but it's worth adding:
Update — See Amanda Siberling, "Why AI can't spell 'strawberry'", TechCrunch 8/27/2024:
It’s a bit of a troll that memes about AI being unable to spell “strawberry” are circulating at the same time as reports on OpenAI’s Strawberry. But OpenAI CEO Sam Altman jumped at the opportunity to show us that he’s got a pretty impressive berry yield in his garden.
And Kit Eaton, "How Many "R"s in Strawberry? This AI Doesn't Know", Inc 8/28/2024:
"Hey ChatGPT, how many 'R's are there in the word strawberry?"
"There are two 'R's' in the word 'strawberry.'"
"Are you sure? Because there are three."
"No, count again. S-T-R, that's one R. A-W-B-E-R-R, that's two more R's. Y. Three R's."
"I see what you did there! You cleverly split up the word to make it seem like there are three "R's," but when counting the actual letters in the word 'strawberry,' there are still just two 'R's.' It's a fun twist, though!" […]
Things got weirder. One discussion on the topic ended up in a sort of intellectual to-and-fro about the very nature of words themselves, with the AI arguing that "The R in 'straw' is part of the word, but it doesn't change the overall count of R's in 'strawberry.'"
A few relevant past posts:
"LLMs as coders", 6/6/2023
"LLMs can't reason?", 8/8/2023
"More on LLMs' current problem-solving abilities", 8/12/2023
"The reversal curse", 9/27/2023
Jarek Weckwerth said,
August 28, 2024 @ 6:41 am
Oh yes, this looks very familiar. There is also the possibility of asking it how many of something there is, and it will give you a list, but with the wrong number.
David Cameron Staples said,
August 28, 2024 @ 6:58 am
LLMs are not AI, and anyone who claims that they are should be mercilessly mocked.
Moreover, the result of a LLM is not an answer, or an essay, or a legal filing, or a scientific paper: it is a statistically matched set of words which superficially appears to be one. From a distance, it looks a bit like what you asked for, just like a papier-maché 1:1 model of a car looks like a car, except for every single detail.
If you ask for an academic paper, it will give you something that looks like an academic paper, complete with things that looks like references. They will have all the forms of correct references, except for the slight flaw of not existing. They also are simulacra, which merely have the shape of the thing they're representing, but none of the substance.
LLMs use orders of magnitude more power and compute than the 1960s program Eliza, but is exactly as intelligent. And Eliza wouldn't try to talk you around to self-harm because that's where its source corpus of Facebook pages and 4chan indicates such conversations typically go.
Philip Taylor said,
August 28, 2024 @ 8:14 am
Ah, Eliza …
Chris Button said,
August 28, 2024 @ 8:42 am
@ David Cameron Staples
I would say an LLM enables one kind of "generative" AI (and seemingly the only kind mass media wants to talk about) when it is enabled by a unidirectional transformer (a GPT) or a bidirectional transformer.
Marion Owen said,
August 28, 2024 @ 10:58 am
Strangely, it gets 'raspberry' and 'loganberry' correct.