this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
112 points (81.8% liked)

Technology

85600 readers
4517 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] anothermember@feddit.uk 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

You can give an LLM the same seed and it will spit out the same word-for-word response. That’s how they work. It’s just a bunch of math.

You're assuming that because I missed out that detail I must be ignorant of it, that's not very charitable, I could well have been ignorant of it but you could have made your otherwise useful clarification without telling me I was wrong.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca -3 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

You said “that’s not how they work”. But that is how they work. Same prompt = same output. Throw some random data in there to jumble things around and you get a little variance. That’s the seed, and we only need to do that because LLMs are inherently deterministic.

Same reason Minecraft has a random seed for world generation, and block cipher algorithms use an initialization vector and/or feedback loop. We don’t want the same thing every time.

I did say that you’re right, because the tooling we use around the LLM itself does exactly what you’re talking about. So, in practice, you’re right.

[–] anothermember@feddit.uk 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Again, you're telling me what I already know, because you're still assuming. I can make the point that same prompts don't produce the same output without explaining about random seeds.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I honestly wasn’t trying to attack you. I think we should be careful when we talk about LLMs, because it’s important for people to know that it’s just a bunch of math in a computer program. A lot of people have a tendency to anthropomorphize it.

[–] borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 hours ago

A lot of people have a tendency to anthropomorphize it.

Yeah. The amount of people that learned about persistent file-based memory and think it’s some indication that the llm they’re promoting is alive, has sentience, or has persistent self-identity and self-awareness instead of recognizing it’s just a way to inject previously learned context when it’s needed without burning tokens sending it with every prompt you send is out of control.

I stumbled across some weird hybrid psychonaut x Claude collab subreddit the other day and holy shit ai psychosis is real.