this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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[–] knightly@pawb.social 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

LLMs arent "bad" (ignoring, of course, the massive content theft necessary to train them), but they are being wildly misused.

"Analysis" is precisely one of those misuses. Grand Theft Autocomplete can't even count, ask it how many 'e's are in "elephant" and you'll get an answer anywhere from 1 to 3.

This is because they do not read or understand, they produce strings of tokens based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next. If prompted for an analysis they'll output something that looks like an analysis, but to determine whether it is accurate or not a human has to do the work.

[–] howrar@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

LLMs cannot:

  • Tell fact from fiction
  • Accurately recall data from its training set
  • Count

LLMs can

  • Translate
  • Get the general vibe of a text (sentiment analysis)
  • Generate plausible text

Semantics aside, they're very different skills that require different setups to accomplish. Just because counting is an easier task than analysing text for humans, doesn't mean it's the same it's the same for a LLM. You can't use that as evidence for its inability to do the "harder" tasks.

[–] knightly@pawb.social 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

You forgot to put caveats on all the things you claim LLMs can do, but only one of them doesn't need them.

Why would you think that LLMs can do sentiment analysis when they have no concept of context or euphemism and are wholly incapable of distinguishing sarcasm from genuine sentiment?

Why would you think that their translations are of any use given the above?

https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/mother-of-teen-who-died-by-suicide-sues-ai-startup/90994040