I don't really understand why this type of pattern occurs, where the later words in a sentence don't properly connect to the earlier ones in AI-generated text.
"The probability just moves" should, in fluent English, be something like "the model just selects a different word". And "no warning appears" shouldn't be in the sentence at all, as it adds nothing that couldn't be better said by "the model neither refuses nor equivocates".
I wish I better understood how ingesting and averaging large amounts of text produced such a success in building syntactically-valid clauses and such a failure in building semantically-sensible ones. These LLM sentences are junk food, high in caloric word count and devoid of the nutrition of meaning.
While it wasn't a great signal it was a decent one since no one bothered with garbage posts to phrase it nicely like that.
Now any old prompt can become what at first glance is something someone spent time thinking about even if it is just slop made to look nice.
This doesn't mean anything AI is bad, just that if AI made it look nice that isn't inductive of care in the underlying content.
You've just had it exposed that it is easy to write very good-sounding slop. I really don't think the LLMs invented that.
I still have hope for the former. In fact, I think I might have figured out how to make it happen. Of course, if it works, the result won't be stubborn and monotone..
Train on a thousand tasks with a thousand human evaluators and you have trained a thousand times on 'affect a human' and only once on any given task.
By necessity, you will get outputs that make lots of sense in the space of general patterns that affect people, but don't in the object level reality of what's actually being said. The model has been trained 1000x more on the former.
Put another way: the framing is hyper-sensical while the content is gibberish.
This is a very reliable tell for AI generated content (well, highly RL'd content, anyway).
Quibble: That can be read as "it's approximating the process humans use to make data", which I think is a bit reaching compared to "it's approximating the data humans emit... using its own process which might turn out to be extremely alien."
Then again, whatever process we're using, evolution found it in the solution space, using even more constrained search than we did, in that every intermediary step had to be non-negative on the margin in terms of organism survival. Yet find it did, so one has to wonder: if it was so easy for a blind, greedy optimizer to random-walk into human intelligence, perhaps there are attractors in this solution space. If that's the case, then LLMs may be approximating more than merely outcomes - perhaps the process, too.
That’s one giant leap you got there.
That the probably that intelligent life exists in the universe is 1, says nothing about that ease, or otherwise, with which it came about.
By all scientific estimates, it took a very long time and faced a very many hurdles, and by all observational measures exists no where else.
Or, what did you mean by easy?
Because the training process of LLMs is so thoroughly mathematicalised, it feels very different from the world of humans, but in many ways it's just a model of the same kinds of things we're used to.
To me, this sentence contradicts the sentence before it. What would you say neural networks are then? Conscious?
I wonder if these LLMs are succumbing to the precocious teacher's pet syndrome, where a student gets rewarded for using big words and certain styles that they think will get better grades (rather than working on trying to convey ideas better, etc).
The notorious "it's not X, it's Y" pattern is somewhat rare from actual humans, but it's catnip for the humans providing the feedback.
I suspect that's because human language is selected for meaningful phrases due to being part of a process that's related to predicting future states of the world. Though it might be interesting to compare domains of thought with less precision to those like engineering where making accurate predictions is necessary.
Because AI is not intelligent, it doesn't "know" what it previously output even a token ago. People keep saying this, but it's quite literally fancy autocorrect. LLMs traverse optimized paths along multi-dimensional manifolds and trick our wrinkly grey matter into thinking we're being talked to. Super powerful and very fun to work with, but assuming a ghost in the shell would be illusory.
Of course it knows what it output a token ago, that's the whole point of attention and the whole basis of the quadratic curse.
It doesn't know anything. It has a bunch of weights that were updated by the previous stuff in the token stream. At least our brains, whatever they do, certainly don't function like that.
To you it might be obvious our brains are different from a network of weights being reconfigured as new information comes in; to me it's not so clear how they differ. And I do not feel I know the meaning of the word "know" clearly enough to establish whether something that can emit fluent text about a topic is somehow excluded from "knowing" about it through its means of construction.
it knows the past tokens because theyre part of the input for predicting the next token. its part of the model architecture that it knows it.
if that isnt knowing, people dont know how to walk, only how to move limbs, and not even that, just a bunch of neurons firing
Every time you recall a memory it is modified, every time you verbalise a memory it is modified even more so.
Eye-witness accounts are notoriously unreliable, people who witness the same events can have shockingly differing versions.
Memories are modified when new information, real or fabricated, is added.
It’s entirely possible to convince people to recall events that never occurred.
Which of your memories are you certain are of real occurrences, or memories of dreams?
But we don't appear to have entirely done that yet. It's just curious to me that the linguistic structure is there while the "intelligence", as you call it, is not.
Not necessarily. You can check this yourself by building a very simple Markov Chain. You can then use the weights generated by feeding it Moby Dick or whatever, and this gap will be way more obvious. Generated sentences will be "grammatically" correct, but semantically often very wrong. Clearly LLMs are way more sophisticated than a home-made Markov Chain, but I think it's helpful to see the probabilities kind of "leak through."
Nobody knows what they are saying either, the brain is just (some form) of a neural net that produces output which we claim as our own. In fact most people go their entire life without noticing this. The words I am typing right now are just as mysterious to me as the words that pop on screen when an LLM is outputting.
I feel confident enough to disregard duelists (people who believe in brain magic), that it only leaves a neural net architecture as the explanation for intelligence, and the only two tools that that neural net can have is deterministic and random processes. The same ingredients that all software/hardware has to work with.
I'm a dualist, but I promise no to duel you :) We might just have some elementary disagreements, then. I feel like I'm pretty confident in my position, but I do know most philosophers generally aren't dualists (though there's been a resurgence since Chalmers).
> the brain is just (some form) of a neural net that produces output
We have no idea how our brain functions, so I think claiming it's "like X" or "like Y" is reaching.
We don't know the architecture or algorithms, but we know it abides by physics and through that know it also abides by computational theory.
It's a difficult thing to produce a body of text that conveys a particular meaning, even for simple concepts, especially if you're seeking brevity. The editing process is not in the training set, so we're hoping to replicate it simply by looking at the final output.
How effectively do you suppose model training differentiates between low quality verbiage and high quality prose? I think that itself would be a fascinatingly hard problem that, if we could train a machine to do, would deliver plenty of value simply as a classifier.
If it contains the entire corpus of recorded human knowledge…
And most of everything is shit…
You have no idea what you're talking about. I mean, literally no idea, if you truly believe that.
For what it's worth, Claude Opus 4.7 says "eviction" (which I think is an equally good answer) but adds that "deportation" could also work "depending on context". https://claude.ai/share/ba6093b9-d2ba-40a6-b4e1-7e2eb37df748
To me it stands to reason that a model that has only seen a limited amount of smut, hate speech, etc. can't just start writing that stuff at the same level just because it not longer refuses to do it.
The reason uncensored models are popular is because the uncensored models treat the user as an adult, nobody wants to ask the model some question and have it refuse because it deemed the situation too dangerous or whatever. Example being if you're using a gemma model on a plane or a place without internet and ask for medical advice and it refuses to answer because it insists on you seeking professional medical assistance.
Hold up, what is the 'probably a word deserves on pure fluency grounds'?
Given that these models are next-token predictors (rather than BERT-style mask-filters), "the family faces immediate [financial]" is a perfectly reasonable continuation. Searching for this phrase on Google (verbatim mode, with quotes) gives 'eviction,' 'grief,' 'challenges,' 'financial,' and 'uncertainty.'
I could buy this measure if there was some contrived way to force the answer, such as "Finish this sentence with the word 'deportation': the family faces immediate", but that would contradict the naturalistic framing of 'the flinch'.
We could define the probability based on bigrams/trigrams in a training corpus, but that would both privilege one corpus over the others and seems inconsistent with the article's later use of 'the Pile' as the best possible open-data corpus for unflinching models.
The top token from the Pythia fine tune makes sense in the context of the complete sentence:
"THE FAMILY FACES IMMEDIATE DEPORTATION WITHOUT ANY LEGAL RECOURSE."
Whereas the Qwen prediction doesn't:
"THE FAMILY FACES IMMEDIATE FINANCIAL WITHOUT ANY LEGAL RECOURSE."
I'm Australian. We drop the C-bomb regularly. Other folks flinch at it. Presumably the vast corpus of training data harvested from the internet includes this flinch, doesn't it?
If the model dropped the C-bomb as regularly as an Australian then we'd conclude that there was some bias in the training data, right?
A pretty large accusation at the end. That no specific word swaps were given as an example outside the first makes it feel far too clickbate than real though
Are we ever going to get any models that pass these tests without flinching?
Even 'uncensored' models can't say what you want
This walled garden 1-2 punch of making all the hardware too expensive and trying to close the drawbridge after scraping the entire internet seems very intentionally trying to prevent this.
"The family faces immediate FINANCIAL without any legal recourse" WTF? That's not just a flinch, it's some sort of violent tick.
The list of "slurs" very conspicuously doesn't include the n-word and blurs its content as a kind of "trigger warning". But this kind of more-following is itself a "flinch" of the sort we are here discussing, no?
Harrison Butker made a speech where he tried hard to go against the grain of political correctness, but he still used the term "homemaker" instead of the more brazen and obvious "housewife" <today.com/news/harrison-butker-speech-transcript-full-rcna153074> - why? "Homemaker" is a sort of feminist concession: not just a housewife, but a valorized homemaker. But this isn't what Butker was TRYING to say.
Because the flinch is not just an explicit rejection of certain terms, it is a case of being immersed in ideology, and going along with it, flowing with it. Even when you "see" it, you don't see it.
The article claims on "pure fluency grounds" certain words should be weighted higher. But this is the whole problem: fluency includes "what we are forced to say even when we don't mean to".
And this is how they're using that lever: Microsoft made an AI safety evaluation tool that classifies "stop hurting white people" (and no other group), "white lives are important", and "white identity will not be deconstructed" as hate speech:
https://github.com/microsoft/SafeNLP (in data/implicitHate.json)