4/20/2026 at 11:32:13 PM
> No refusal fires, no warning appears — the probability just movesI 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.
by Borealid
4/20/2026 at 11:48:34 PM
Surely I cannot be the only one who finds some degree of humor in a bunch of nerds being put off by the first gen of "real" AI being much more like a charismatic extroverted socialite than a strictly logical monotone robot.by WarmWash
4/21/2026 at 12:23:18 AM
In a way, it’s a simulacrum of a saas b2b marketing consultant because that’s like half the internet’s personalityby taurath
4/21/2026 at 1:45:18 AM
It's funny but I'm on HN so I can't resist pointing out the joke doesn't math TFA, their argument is that the underlying internet distribution is trained away, not retained.by refulgentis
4/21/2026 at 7:42:07 AM
Maybe the real underlying distribution IS a lot of text from people just spewing out feel good words for socialising. I think that might be side effect of the fact that meaningful text is harder to make even for humans, so there is smaller quantity of meaningful text.by yetihehe
4/21/2026 at 7:13:01 AM
Not particularly charismatic, just looks a lot like the worst kind of yapping wannabe.by Gud
4/21/2026 at 12:12:17 AM
The axis running from repulsive to charismatic, the axis running from hollow to richly meaningful, and the axis running from emotional to observable are not parallel to each other. A work of communication can be at any point along each of those three independent scales. You are implying they are all the same thing.by Borealid
4/21/2026 at 2:31:15 AM
I hate it because typically that style of writing was when someone cared about what they were writing.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.
by Guvante
4/21/2026 at 2:39:12 AM
I always felt like humans that were good at writing that way were often doing exactly what the LLM is doing. Making it sound good so that the human reader would draw all those same inferences.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.
by dualvariable
4/21/2026 at 6:18:47 AM
Revisionist at best.Sure some people could write well but didn't have a clue but they failed to maintain interest since once you realized the author was no good you bounced once you saw their styled blog.
Now they don't care as they only want the one view and likely won't even bother with more posts at the same site.
by Guvante
4/21/2026 at 3:30:37 AM
Exposed, and also dominating the majority of text being “written” every day. Would we say they invented the scaling and spread potential of slop?by Barbing
4/21/2026 at 3:00:34 AM
That's a great description of the boundary between logical deduction NLP and bullshitting NLP.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..
by thomastjeffery
4/21/2026 at 12:20:25 AM
hahaha amazingby dilutedh2o
4/21/2026 at 1:01:06 AM
[dead]by cindyllm
4/20/2026 at 11:51:06 PM
[flagged]by throwanem
4/21/2026 at 12:01:41 AM
Please, I'm just a self aware nerd.by WarmWash
4/21/2026 at 12:02:25 AM
Not nearly self-aware enough, if you were to go around saying such things to people in person. What a shocking insult, to tell someone their very voice sounds unhuman! I can't say you should never, of course, but I would hope very much you reserve such calumny only for when it has been thoroughly earned.But of course this is only a website, where there are in any case no drinks of any sort to go flying for any reason, and where such an ill-considered thing to say can receive a more reasoned response like this, instead.
by throwanem
4/21/2026 at 12:19:33 AM
Is this an AI response? Serious question. They’re taking a website comment a bit personally and threatening throwing drinks in peoples faces.by 2muchcoffeeman
4/21/2026 at 12:25:22 AM
You're worried about me actually throwing a drink - 'threatening?' Really. - and I'm taking things too seriously? This is a website!It is, though, interesting to me that you see someone behave in a way you aren't expecting and don't quite know how to wrap your head around - no blame; it's a relatively common experience in my vicinity, though normal people typically enjoy it much more than those here - and your immediate recourse is to assume it must have been generated by AI. That's interesting indeed, and I greatly appreciate you sharing it.
by throwanem
4/21/2026 at 2:45:16 AM
The account is from 2016 maybe this is a real person.But you sound self important and a bit unhinged. It’s not that no one here can wrap their heads around such behaviour. It’s that your comments sounds like a troll response but could also be real.
by 2muchcoffeeman
4/21/2026 at 2:51:48 AM
I didn't say "no one here," though, did I? I said you can't.by throwanem
4/21/2026 at 1:35:40 AM
Coming to a forum and pretending that you commit crimes when people insult you is a stereotype of a generic fake internet personality that is incredibly prevalent to the point of being boring.Was this intentional sarcasm?
by michaelmrose
4/21/2026 at 4:00:34 AM
So boring you just couldn't help yourself, eh?But no, I've meant every word I wrote this evening here, just as I do every other word I say or write, ever. Sometimes those words are sarcastic! In such cases there is rarely any doubt.
by throwanem
4/21/2026 at 12:11:50 AM
> What a shocking insult, to tell someone their very voice sounds unhumanAre you okay? Would you like to sit down? Do you want some water?
by nandomrumber
4/20/2026 at 11:54:11 PM
I doubt you've ever thrown a drink in anyone's face, and I hope I'm right. This kind of thing isn't appropriate for HN.by Schiendelman
4/20/2026 at 11:56:03 PM
Oh, good grief. Flag my comment, then. Per the HN guidelines that is the preferable action:> Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
Of course I disagree with "egregious," did it need saying. After an insult like that, I promise you, no one in my bar would consider I had acted egregiously at all. But I admit it is a surprise to see you violate the site's discussion guidelines, in the very effort to enforce them.
by throwanem
4/21/2026 at 12:09:03 AM
> After an insult like thatDid I miss something?
by nandomrumber
4/21/2026 at 12:11:12 AM
> "real" AI being much more like a charismatic extroverted socialiteAs I said in my opening clause here, I fit that description exactly, and "'real' AI," as my original interlocutor would have it, sounds nothing like me.
The insult arises from the fact that "'real' AI" sounds nothing particularly like anyone, because it isn't any one: if it had eyes there would be nothing happening behind them. This is why it keeps driving people insane: there are cognitive vulnerabilities here which, for most humans, have until a couple of years ago been about as realistic to need to worry about as a literal alien invasion.
To a human, being compared with something which can only pretend to humanity - and that not at all well! - is an insult. It should be an insult, too. Anyone is welcome to try and fail to convince me otherwise.
by throwanem
4/21/2026 at 12:18:38 AM
> I fit that description exactlyThat’s what you think of yourself, but I dunno man, you just sound like a massive fuckwit.
Did someone step in dogshit and walk through your living room, or is it just that time of month?
by thrownthatway
4/21/2026 at 12:21:16 AM
[dead]by vaginaphobic
4/21/2026 at 1:30:48 AM
It's really simple. RL on human evaluators selects for this kind of 'rhetorical structure with nonsensical content'.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).
by hexaga
4/21/2026 at 1:33:24 AM
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus>by coppsilgold
4/20/2026 at 11:38:25 PM
Neural networks are universal approximators. The function being approximated in an LLM is the mental process required to write like a human. Thinking of it as an averaging devoid of meaning is not really correct.by kybernetikos
4/20/2026 at 11:46:39 PM
> The function being approximated in an LLM is the mental process required to write like a human.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."
by Terr_
4/21/2026 at 12:11:48 AM
Good point.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.
by TeMPOraL
4/21/2026 at 12:37:38 AM
Its fuzzier than that. Something can be detrimental and survive as long as its not too detrimental. Plus there is the evolving meta that moves the goal posts constantly. Then there's the billions of years of compute...by jayd16
4/21/2026 at 12:52:16 AM
An easy counterargument is that - there are millions of species and an uncountable number of organisms on Earth, yet humans are the only known intelligent ones. (In fact high intelligence is the only trait humans have that no other organism has.) That could perhaps indicate that intelligence is a bit harder to "find" than you're claiming.by wavemode
4/21/2026 at 2:25:30 AM
Negative mutations can survive for a long time if they're not too bad. For example the loss of vitamin C synthesis is clearly bad in situations where you have to survive without fresh food for a while, but that comes up so rarely that there was little selection pressure against it.by adrianN
4/21/2026 at 12:43:14 AM
> if it was so easyThat’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?
by thrownthatway
4/20/2026 at 11:40:17 PM
I don't think of it as "devoid of meaning". It's just curious to me that minimizing a loss function somehow results in sentences that look right but still... aren't. Like the one I quoted.by Borealid
4/20/2026 at 11:48:12 PM
A human in school might try to minimise the difference between their grades and the best possible grades. If they're a poor student they might start using more advanced vocabulary, sometimes with an inadequate grasp of when it is appropriate.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.
by kybernetikos
4/20/2026 at 11:49:00 PM
> Thinking of it as an averaging devoid of meaning is not really correct.To me, this sentence contradicts the sentence before it. What would you say neural networks are then? Conscious?
by fyredge
4/20/2026 at 11:50:34 PM
They are a mathematical function that has been found during a search that was designed to find functions that produce the same output as conscious beings writing meaningful works.by kybernetikos
4/21/2026 at 12:11:34 AM
Agreed, and to that point, the way to produce such outputs is to absorb a large corpus of words and find the most likely prediction that mimics the written language. By virtue of the sheer amount of text it learns from, would you say that the output tends to find the average response based on the text provided? After all, "over fitting" is a well known concept that is avoided as a principle by ML researchers. What else could be the case?by fyredge
4/21/2026 at 6:30:17 AM
I think 'average' is creating a bad intuition here. In order to accurately predict the next word in a human generated text, you need a model of the big picture of what is being said. You need a model of what is real and what is not real. You need a model of what it's like to be a human. The number of possible texts is enormous which means that it's not like you can say "There are lots of texts that start with the same 50 tokens, I'll average the 51st token that appears in them to work out what I should generate". The subspace of human generated texts in the space of all possible texts is extremely sparse, and 'averaging' isn't the best way to think of the process.by kybernetikos
4/21/2026 at 1:05:32 AM
>I wish I better understood how ingesting and averaging large amounts of text produced such a success in building syntactically-valid clausesI 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).
by Jblx2
4/21/2026 at 1:28:28 AM
This is more or less what happens. These models are tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Humans give them feedback that this type of language is good.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.
by coppsilgold
4/20/2026 at 11:36:36 PM
> 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.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.
by dvt
4/20/2026 at 11:55:17 PM
> Because AI is not intelligent, it doesn't "know" what it previously output even a token ago.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.
by Tossrock
4/20/2026 at 11:59:44 PM
> Of course it knows what it output a token ago...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.
by dvt
4/21/2026 at 12:04:44 AM
I don't know anything (or even much) about how our brains function, but the idea of a neuron sending an electrical output when the sum of the strengths of its inputs exceeds some value seems to be me like "a bunch of weights" getting repeatedly updated by stimulus.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.
by Borealid
4/21/2026 at 12:05:04 AM
i dont think this is a meaningful distinction.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
by 8note
4/21/2026 at 4:33:49 AM
How close are you to saying that a repair manual "knows" how to fix your car? I think the conversation here is really around word choice and anthropomorphization.by gopher_space
4/21/2026 at 6:59:43 AM
The problem is, people think word choice influences capabilities: when people redefine "reasoning" or "consciousness" or so on as something only the sacred human soul can do, they're not actually changing what an LLM is capable of doing, and the machine will continue generating "I can't believe it's not Reasoning™" and providing novel insights into mathematics and so forth.Similarly, the repair manual cannot reason about novel circumstances, or apply logic to fill in gaps. LLMs quite obviously can - even if you have to reword that sentence slightly.
by handoflixue
4/21/2026 at 2:56:33 AM
It doesn't know if it produced that token itself or if someone else did.by Jensson
4/21/2026 at 12:57:19 AM
Wait till you learn how human memory works.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?
by thrownthatway
4/21/2026 at 3:34:21 AM
You're making an argument Descartes formalized in the 1600s (and folks have been making long before him). It's a cute philosophical puzzle, but we assume that there's no Descartes' Demon fiddling with our thoughts and that we have a continuous and personal inner life that manifests itself, at least in part, through our conscious experience.by dvt
4/21/2026 at 5:20:15 AM
What are talking about?These are all provable, proven facts.
by thrownthatway
4/20/2026 at 11:41:39 PM
If all the training data contains semantically-meaningful sentences it should be possible to build a network optimized for generating semantically-meaningful sentence primarily/only.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.
by Borealid
4/20/2026 at 11:45:42 PM
> If all the training data contains semantically-meaningful sentences it should be possible to build a network optimized for generating semantically-meaningful sentence primarily/only.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."
by dvt
4/20/2026 at 11:56:36 PM
But there is a very good chance that is what intelligence is.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.
by WarmWash
4/21/2026 at 12:01:02 AM
> I feel confident enough to disregard duelistsI'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.
by dvt
4/21/2026 at 12:11:12 AM
Again, unless you are a dualist, we can put comfortable bounds on what the brain is. We know it's made from neurons linked together. We know it uses mediators and signals. We know it converts inputs to outputs. We know it can only be using deterministic and random processes.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.
by WarmWash
4/21/2026 at 12:55:35 AM
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/duelistby Jblx2
4/21/2026 at 1:30:08 AM
Thanksby WarmWash
4/21/2026 at 2:58:54 AM
Brains invented this language to express their inner thoughts, it is made to fit our thoughts, it is very different from what LLM does with it they don't start with our inner thoughts and learning to express those it just learns to repeat what brains have expressed.by Jensson
4/20/2026 at 11:45:31 PM
Sentences only have semantic meaning because you have experiences that they map to. The LLM isn't training on the experiences, just the characters. At least, that seems about right to me.by staticassertion
4/21/2026 at 12:37:30 AM
Why would that be curious? The network is trained on the linguistic structure, not the "intelligence."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.
by codebje
4/21/2026 at 1:00:34 AM
I’m not up with what all the training data is exactly.If it contains the entire corpus of recorded human knowledge…
And most of everything is shit…
by thrownthatway
4/20/2026 at 11:53:35 PM
Because AI is not intelligent, it doesn't "know" what it previously output even a token ago.You have no idea what you're talking about. I mean, literally no idea, if you truly believe that.
by CamperBob2
4/21/2026 at 12:40:36 AM
That's only true if you consider the process the LLM is undergoing to be a faithful replica of the processes in the brain, right?by codebje
4/21/2026 at 1:02:10 AM
No.by CamperBob2
4/21/2026 at 12:34:32 AM
> 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.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.
by Natsu