Not a Robot

I was walking down the street with my brother on a hot day on our way into a bookstore and I said “I hate the sun. It’s too hot. Name ONE reason we need the sun. Literally I can’t think of a single reason why we can’t just figure out a way to block it”

And a guy turned and looked at me with the most dumbfounded and horrified expression Id seen since the last time someone looked at me like that (about a week before) and then turned to the girl with him and they both looked mistified in the worst way.

They really thought I don’t know what the sun’s for.

I could’ve told them I work in environmental science but I was having a conversation with my brother.

Those two people think that’s the day they overheard probably the stupidest thing any human being has ever loudly said in a bookstore.

That’s fine.

It's talked about like being obsessively neat or repeating pointless tasks is the main part of it, when really those are just potential symptoms.

The main thing behind OCD is not being about to turn off a thought. There's a thing where most people can just stop thinking about something. If it's over, it's not relevant, it doesn't matter anymore, people can turn their attention away. For OCD, that mechanism can get stuck. And some thought that was supposed to just temporarily pass through your head just stays there. An image of an object rotating. An anxiety about something bad happening. A wish that you made on a dandelion. These are all things that have at some point gotten stuck in my head, sometimes for years at a time.

The compulsions, the rituals, are the person trying to address the thought so it can go away. After all, if you're worried about the door not being locked you can check the lock. But for someone with OCD, that doesn't make the stuck thought go away. So they check it again. And again. And they made a ritual, maybe if I check it exactly five times, I'll know that it's locked and I can let this worry go.

It helps a little. It feels like you're doing something. But it doesn't solve the problem. Actual therapy for OCD involves not doing the compulsion. Instead, you ignore the thought, move around it, try not to give it space in your life. Your mind won't let the thought go normally, so instead you fill yourself with other thoughts. Other parts of your life.

cause like. apart from the (potential) exception of writing code, there is not really anything useful that a Large Language Model can do.

it imitates patterns in the text that it takes in

that's fundamentally how it works

Yes, haha funny, the AI is bamboozled by spelling, but seriously: I asked Google the same question 5 different times just now, and not only did I get 5 incorrect answers, I got 5 completely different incorrect answers.

The fact that they're different every time demonstrates just how much of an LLM's output is up to random chance. This is how LLMs imitate human language: each stage of constructing the text has built-in randomness, just like how human language has variation and flexibility.

This is my problem with using these things in the workplace. Like, imagine you're using an LLM to fill out a report of an accident that happened, or to write dietary recommendations for a patient, or to give feedback on a paper a student wrote...really anything you can think of.

Even if the LLM-generated text doesn't say anything technically flat-out wrong, the words and details are still randomized instead of being chosen by you for an actual reason.

like, let me put it this way, you can use a LLM to write a recommendation letter for a student because it looks like you wrote it. You're benefiting from the fact that written text, up until recently, necessarily had a person that wrote it.

stopping at stop signs even when there's no traffic in sight and not pulling forward onto a train track before the car ahead of you moves far enough forward to give you space to get off the tracks again are more intuitive examples of this practice.

basically, what you'd be doing if you cross against the light is you're loading onto yourself all of the liability in case you've judged the situation wrongly.

in driving, people often say that consistency matters more than courtesy. things like yielding when you have the right of way may feel nice to do for someone, but it is confusing to everybody else on the road and adds to the mental load of other drivers by interfering with the predictable behavior that everyone uses to navigate the complex situation that is navigating the shared space of roads and intersections.

people also have, let's say, varying, abilities to judge the situations in front of them well. one person's "there's no cars at the intersection" is "no cars are in sight" and another person's is "there's cars but they're a ways away" and another person's is "they're coming but I can make it if I run" and another person's is "eh, they can avoid hitting me." more and more people doing this is more and more opportunities for bad judgment to turn into tragedy, and of course more situations where a driver with the right of way has to navigate pedestrians being where they're not supposed to be, which is nerve-wracking.

there's places where there are a lot of pedestrians wandering around and drivers have to be more alert to avoid hitting them, such as parking lots, but nobody would like for that experience to be expanded to include all roads. nobody wants to have to stop on green because some optimistic pedestrian has decided to play Frogger. nobody wants their commute time to increase by a third because the flow of traffic is interrupted by regular pedestrian incursions against the light. nobody wants to sit and wait in traffic more often while emergency vehicles converge on a spot long enough to shovel up chunky salsa that used to be a person, which gets both more likely and more unpleasant the faster the traffic that person tried to dodge is.

traffic is a system and it runs on rules, many of which involve questions of who has the right of way at a given time. people deciding to write their own exceptions muck up the system, making it less efficient and more expensive for everyone in time, cognitive load, and property, lives, and emotional well-being.