this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
163 points (97.1% liked)
Fuck AI
7256 readers
1542 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A tool has a deterministic outcome, you hammer a nail you know the outcome, you saw a board you know the outcome. No matter how many times you do the same process you know the outcome. Even dice have a boundary of outcomes you can understand.
You give an AI the same string of prompts multiple times and you will get a different outcome each time. Whether its updates to the model or the fact AI's own response contributes to its context which small changes will build up over time, there is no way of knowing what the outcome will be, how accurate it is, or how to recreate the same results (especially with multiple prompts involved).
I wouldn't call it a tool for that reason but maybe I am nitpicking here.
I'd say if a tool produces predictable results, even if not fully deterministic, it qualifies as a tool. It might not be right for jobs were precision is needed, but the current LLMs and GenAI are perfectly suitable for their primary purpose:
Conning idiots into trading their skills and natural intelligence for a promise of convenience, scamming managers into fucking over employees for a promise of saving money, then pulling the rug, cashing in on the desperation of those who can no longer function without it, ruining a generation of students that don't yet have the expertise to realise the full extent of the damage they're doing to their own skills (including, as some other post brought up, the skill to not kill people with your MedGPT malpractice), causing unpredictable damage to a host of economies and industries, fucking over residents that don't get a (democratic) say in whether they want to have a data center chugging their water supply, fucking up the climate, fucking the whole world...
In short: LLMs and GenAI are a tool to sell our future for a quick buck we'll never see.
I think it could be a tool. Maybe. So long as what you wanted was correct-sounding nonsense, it's perfect for that.
Of course, when they say "AI is a tool," what they mean is "AI is not political," which is obviously ridiculous. Tools have never not been political, and like Icarus, their wings will burn up eventually.
Language modeling is equivalent to a dice roll (given a perfect random number generator). Setting the temperature to 0 removes all randomness from the output, meaning the model always selects the highest probability next word, and the model becomes 100% deterministic. That is, the output of a model is entirely predictable given temperature = 0, you know the model weights, and the seed/prompt.
These technicalities aside, it’s true for both a dice roll event and a specific model/prompt event that, practically speaking, the outputs are treated as probabilistic despite being mathematically/technically deterministic: a human can’t predict with 100% accuracy the output of a die despite the theory (classical mechanics of die positioning, force, velocity, friction, …) proving determinism
You know the boundaries of a dice roll based one the number of sides of the dice. You will never know the boundaries of the AI.
With a D20 I know I have a 5% chance of at a roll of 20 and 50% chance to roll over 10. With AI you don't even know if the data it was trained on was even accurate or if it will hallucinate and speak nonsense.
You can literally ask an AI how many letter Ts are in the word colonialism and it will tell you two. Now how on earth could anyone have known its probability to say that clearly wrong answer?
Also each AI session its response to your prompts contribute to the context of the session and small alterations in how the AI speaks build up and change the outcome of a session, thus the AIs own responses effect its probabilities, another thing you cannot account for.
Yes, you do know the boundaries of AI. It is purely matrix multiplication: its output distribution is just as intelligible as the distribution of rolls of a dice. We receive a probability distribution for the next token given a sequence of tokens. This is demonstrable; search for softmax online.
To fairly equate a dice roll event to a model prompt event we must understand the technicalities. To say you have a 20 sided die, is equivalent to saying you have a specific model’s architecture and value of every parameter, in the context of qualifying event determinism.
If you can assume your die is fair, and 20 sided, that is an equivalent assumption about a model as to saying it’s llama-3.1-8B-instruct. That is, you do know the specific model weights, corresponding to a functional relationship between input and output which is deterministic. That is, if you know the model weights, which is equivalent to knowing whether a die is fair and n-sided, you can deterministically predict the output of a model as you can deterministically predict which number on a die will land
You’re making specific, technical errors about the mathematical basis of language modeling, and equating things fallaciously to a similar deterministic event.
Despite this, your intuition is right: we can’t perceptually predict the output of a model as we can’t perceptually predict what number will result from a die roll