I Don't Want to Interact with Stochastic Parrots

wazzap

HN now has AI/LLM-enabled comment processing. Even if you don’t want to interact with the machine it will interact with you. You will eat ze bugs and you will be happy.

burntpineapple

Outright refusal of the tech based on outdated takes is such a boring, luddite opinion

streb-lo

We are all stochastic parrots. Currently, millions of years of evolutionary pressure have produced a better algorithm than a few years of optimization pressure but we’ll see how long that remains true!

vova_hn2

I'm very sorry to say it, but even reading LLM-slop is less tiresome, then reading yet another anti-AI slop article. It's a pretty low bar. I could find 10 anti-AI posts on HN and they all will contain points from a very narrow pool of anti-AI takes. I mean, how many more times do you need to repeat them? > stochastic algorithms trained to produce tons of "average," non-human content As we can see, humans are also quite capable of producing "average" content. And by "average" I don't mean "average quality", I mean "average opinion of a certain group".

augment_me

You won't be able to choose at some point, and you probably already read plenty of AI generated stuff, it's a survivorship bias. I have a SKILL that emulates how my supervisor prefers his answers and papers, he used to get triggered by generated stuff, but now it just writes in a style he likes which I got from a bunch of his papers and everything goes smoother. If you are bottlenecking someone they will just do the same to you.

ike2792

This is how I've felt for a long time now. Sadly, I work at a company whose leadership is incessantly pushing "AI native" and I recently was denied a promotion in part because I don't share our VP's rosy view of AI. "Innovation teams" who generate all of their code with AI get tons of recognition while real engineers that are doing real work behind the scenes are ignored by leadership. I keep hoping this bubble will burst and sanity will return, but I fear that the hold AI has on executives' minds may be a permanent one.

mindcrime

Great. And you felt the need to scream this to the entire world? Look, if you don't like Generative AI, then don't use it. This isn't rocket science, and you're not making yourself look hip, cool, edgy, informed, suave, or anything else by yelling about it. Just go do you. Other people may do likewise. Others still might make different choices. And both cases are fine. And never mind that the whole premise of this article is simply wrong. Look at the things GenAI systems are doing today and it's clear that they are more than just "parrots" stochastic or otherwise. Not even looking at the Navier-Stokes thing, but there are Youtube videos out there of PhD candidates in math who have tried out various models from a "can this help me with research level mathematics?" perspective multiple times, and quite often the answer is at least a qualified "yes". Does it really make sense to say that a stochastic approximation of "very average" content can be helpful in doing research level mathematics? I'm thinking "no". My own anecdotal experience also suggests that whatever LLM's do, it amounts to more than being a mere parrot. ChatGPT was incredibly helpful to me over the weekend, for example, getting started on some neuromorphic computing stuff I wanted to do. It was amazingly helpful at debugging circuit problems, helping me setup some LXI/SCPI automation of my test equipment, doing literature reviews, yadda, yadda, yadda. Even better, unlike most human interlocutors I might want to interact with, it is fine with my weird "night owl" hours, happily debugging circuits at 2:00am, 3:00am, and on into the early morning hours. It never gets tired, never belittles me, tolerates my repeated questions, etc. I get that some people are "anti-AI" for their own reasons, but I hope some of those people will at least stop and try to understand why some of us think modern GenAI systems are about the best thing since sliced bread. shrug

ang_cire

> You cannot assume anything about generated code. Maybe it was simply hallucinated and, by chance, it compiled. This is, ironically, similar to my mom's anti-mental-healthcare argument that the system producing a good outcome is not evidence that the process is correct. It's everyone's choice what stances they take, and if being utterly opposed to any kind of AI interaction is their's, that's their choice, but just own that choice without resorting to absurdity to attempt to lend it a false sense of credibility. LLMs don't produce working code through mere hallucinatory chance, they do it by mathematical approximation, which is no more or less valid than pasting together programs from stack overflow answers. Idgaf if the person who coded a program had intention when writing a line of code I never see because it's a compiled binary blob, I care that the program works. And frankly, pretending otherwise is pretentious BS.

FranklinMaillot

The stance is defensible but the article reads like it was written in 2023. Still using the term 'stochastic parrot', in 2026, when century-old mathematical problems are being proven by LLMs almost on a weekly basis doesn't make sense.

jordemort

> Using AI is like a shameful drug addiction or a weird sex fetish This is unfair to drug users and perverts

aogaili

Do those people feel important by objecting on those tools? Like they are above others?

rkagerer

If I get even a whiff of AI smell from an email I receive, the sender gets permablocked. My attention is too valuable for you to insult me by subjecting me to your slop. Take the time for some human interaction. If it's not worth your time to do so, then it most certainly isn't worth mine, either.

abstractspoon

I'm a 60M, recently retired and I wholly agree with this piece. I was classically educated and trained as a structural engineer before turning to software. My experience throughout my career was to observe at every turn the total absence of an engineering ethos which rests on a deep understanding of theory, materials, process and construction. Vibing software will destroy what little rigor there ever was in software development.