this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
168 points (88.5% liked)
Technology
84769 readers
3607 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- 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.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
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
How is it a semantic argument? They're talking about how LLMs work on a functional level, not arguing the meaning of compassion itself. It's not hard to say that they emulate compassion and intelligence relatively well, applying human adjectives without any nuance just opens it up to being misinterpreted by people who don't know any better.
It's semantic because it's really about language. Who cares that it's not doing that like a human would, everyone who knows anything knows that and they were clearly using language in a less cumbersome way.
yes, everyone already knows what you're saying, but it doesn't matter and serves no purpose other than making it difficult to talk about their behaviours. The only workaround for this would be inventing new terms for when an ai does a behavior that resembles a human one. It'd be very cumbersome and add no value to any conversation.
This is assuming that the average person has a solid grasp of the inner workings of an LLM, which unfortunately isn't the case. Regardless, it would only be a semantic argument if they were shifting the meanings of the relevant words to support their argument, which they evidently weren't doing here.
LLMs don't think, they predict patterns in language mathematically, making them functionally incapable of human capacities like compassion and intelligence, both of which require a conscious mind to be displayed. To use words that go against that without being precise is to imply the opposite. It's simply a matter of describing it accurately.
If anything, considering it 'AI' is a semantic argument because it implies there's some form of higher thinking occurring under the surface, which there clearly isn't. It would be like if I said my PC was intelligent because it has a CPU. Obviously we've passed the point of using a better term, but it's still unfortunate we've decided on that because it's inherently misleading.
I think you're using cumbersome in an unnecessarily negative way since it's very much an inevitable feature of the concept at hand. Yes, it's cumbersome, like all controversial fields of study. Things like that work themselves out over time. Until then we'll just have to deal with it without misleading anyone.
What exactly is the harm in people being mislead in this way, as long as they still know about the risks of hallucination, in your eyes?
When is being mislead not a bad thing? In a perfect world, there would be none of that. Of course we don't live in a utopia, but I'd prefer if we avoid spreading skewed understandings of anything at all as much as possible. It's a matter of principle.
Nobody does this when people say their computer is "thinking" when it's running slow, I just don't see the necessity of pointing this out every time the topic is brought up.
Ideally people who say that aren't misled into believing their computer is thinking in the same way that a human is
Having an inaccurate view about something so fundamental to the topic leads you to predict reality incorrectly and make bad decisions
Nobody does this when people say their computer is "thinking" when it's running slow, I just don't see the necessity of pointing this out every time the topic is brought up.
I agree it's unnecessary to point out. Using anthropomorphising shorthand to talk about technology is extremely common, and AI is no different; saying an AI is "thinking" or whatever is fine. But there is a difference between using that language as shorthand, and actually holding misconceptions about what is really happening. So saying that it's fine for someone to be misled and use that language is different than just saying the language makes sense to use.
Because you cant prove that isnt how you do it either.