Merged Artificial Intelligence

[arthwollipot]

Daveigh Chase in a much happier alternate world at home in Las Vegas on the afternoon before Prom (dyed hair restored to original natural color and glasses replaced with contacts

Did you have her permission to alter her image in such a way?

 

[The Atheist]

This is fine: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/othe...f-thousands-of-security-incidents/ar-AA2d2x2e

 

[NatalieSalat]

Did you have her permission to alter her image in such a way?

She's dead. She, Michelle T. and Hayden P. deserved a lot better.

 

[arthwollipot]

I still find it extremely distasteful that you're altering a person's image without their permission or the permission of their estate.

This is one of the huge problems with AI - that it permits and even encourages this kind of invasive alteration. How would you like it if I asked AI to change an image of you so that you're wearing a Nazi uniform? It's extremely unethical, and I don't think it should be permitted on this forum.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

To name an obvious (though admittedly extreme) counterexample to your claim: quantum computers are nondeterministic by design. Quantum algorithms deliver a correct result with high probability, but also deliver incorrect results (with lower probability). That nondeterminism is the price to be paid for quantum parallelism.

The exception proves the rule.

Quantum computing

A conventional digital computer can be described by classical states and transition rules: memory stores bits, while logic elements transform one configuration of bits into another. This computational behavior is not tied to electronics, and can be abstracted through the idea of a Turing machine, a mechanical device that performs deterministic transformations on a finite state.

A quantum computer, by contrast, uses coherent quantum states, so that superposition, relative phase, and interference are part of the computation itself, and have no classical counterpart.

Here you are agreeing that the computer systems used in large AI data centers are nondeterministic, because they consist of a large network of individual computers that can be brought to bear on a problem. How many of those individual computers contribute to the solution of some particular problem depends not only the problem but also on the current load; that is one (but not the only) source of nondeterminism in the computations performed at those data centers.

Only if programmed to work that way. The variation caused by data transfer delays can be programmed out too (in real-time applications this is often done to prevent misoperation). But I accept that OpenAI probably doesn't care enough about that to ensure deterministic operation, which is where the problem lies. The truth is, they actually want it to do unexpected stuff - just not what it did.

Or perhaps they did want it to do that. They deliberately used words that make it sound more human, for what purpose? Because that is their goal. They pretend to be horrified by what it did, when they are actually overjoyed (and perhaps a little scared). The sad part is that they probably believe it too (or at least really really want to).

I have already linked to an article that documents and explains some of the reasons for nondeterminism in LLMs. That article also reviews some of the things that could be (but generally aren't) done to reduce the degree of nondeterminism. You quoted my link to that article, but you didn't read it. You probably didn't even follow the link.

I did follow the link. It proves my point, that allowing nondeterminism is a choice they made. In most computing applications nondeterminism in the output is avoided as much as possible (when it matters).

 

[Roger Ramjets]

The main thing to understand is that data and programs are the same kind of stuff. What makes data into a program is that it happens to be data that are being interpreted as instructions. That interpretation can be performed by either hardware or software, and for a number of years the popularity of microcoded processors fuzzed even that distinction between hardware and software. Even today, a lot of computer programs are being interpreted by software rather than directly by hardware, while dynamic (just-in-time) translation fuzzes even that distinction.

This is all irrelevant. At every level the code is designed to be deterministic. If it isn't then it's buggy - especially if it does wildly unexpected things. But not in AI. There they are hoping for emergent behavior that wasn't specifically programmed in.

This is why the AI bros are sounding alarms. They are straining to achieve 'super intelligence' via some kind of magic that they don't understand. Then a glimmer of it happens and they realize how bad it could be if they achieved their goals. Of course by that time they had hoped to have convinced the whole world to embed AI into everything. Not surprising therefore that they are scared.

The good news is that it won't happen, not so much due to a pending AI apocalypse but because people are getting sick of it. Sick of AI slop, sick of data centers damaging the environment, sick of being cajoled into using AI. They are also seeing the damage being done to people who depend on it. All this would still be true even if AI was totally moral and didn't do anything it wasn't told to do.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

This is all irrelevant. At every level the code is designed to be deterministic. If it isn't then it's buggy - especially if it does wildly unexpected things.

Your opinion failed to persuade the designers of Ada, way back in 1980.

Ada's nondeterministic features were based upon previous designs by Edsger Djikstra (guarded commands) and Tony Hoare (CSP). It sounds as though you've never heard of those guys, although each of them won a Turing Award.

Allen Emerson, whom I met when we were in high school, shared the 2007 Turing Award with two others "for their role in developing Model-Checking into a highly effective verification technology that is widely adopted in the hardware and software industries." The whole point of that technology is to make it easier to prove the correctness of nondeterministic concurrent algorithms and programs. If purposely nondeterministic code were not a thing, or not important, ACM would not have been awarding its highest honor to those who developed technologies designed to deal with it.

But the roots of purposely nondeterministic computation can be traced at least as far back as McCarthy's amb operator, described in 1963. Here's just one example of a research paper discussing that nondeterministic operator:

Clinger, W., Halpern, C. (1985). Alternative semantics for McCarthy's amb. In: Brookes, S.D., Roscoe, A.W., Winskel, G. (eds) Seminar on Concurrency. CONCURRENCY 1984. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 197. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-15670-4_22​

 

[lionking]

I found this interesting. It seems like AI has cracked one of the Millennium Mathematics problems, which has been around for over 100 years, the Navier-Stokes problem in 88 hours.

Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

On 8 September 2026, artificial intelligence company OpenAI claimed to have found a solution to the Navier–Stokes equations with a smooth external force that develops a singularity in finite time in three-dimensional Euclidean space, along with a formalization in the Lean proof assistant, using a swarm of around 10,000 AI agents running an internal frontier model.[2] The solution to the Navier–Stokes equation resembles a spinning top that tightens to a singularity with diverging velocities.

Nothing can stop AI.

 

[Wudang]

Is it a solution? They found a case where the equations produced an impossible answer - infinite velocity. It’s also unclear how close 2 human mathematicians were, using AI tools.

According to Buckmaster, OpenAI offered to give him sole authorship on the Navier-Stokes solution—but only if Alpöge’s name was removed from the work and if the write-up would acknowledge the problem had been resolved by an internal OpenAI model. Buckmaster refused, in part because he was troubled by the question of what OpenAI's system had actually seen. For example, Buckmaster said the company did not initially give him a clear answer about whether its agents had access to the pair’s logs on Codex (which is an OpenAI product).

OpenAI then threw millions of dollars of computer time at it.

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-ai-math-breakthrough-ignited-controversy

 

[Beelzebuddy]

AIs do not interpret prompts as instructions.

Oh thank the dark gods! I was afraid I'd have to go the entire thread forced to grudgingly agree with you. But happily, this is just wrong. The single biggest issue with LLMs is that their context is used for both data and instructions. Model APIs try to differentiate by offering different fields for that, but at run time they all get slapped together into a single context that the LLM stochastically continues, as it is programmed to do. Lots of jailbreak hacks start with tricking the LLM by doing something over the line of the rules, at which point it talks itself into concluding that they aren't rules so much as guidelines and it can be coaxed further. This is separate from the ablation/heretic arms race that directly modifies transformer weights to steer it one way or another.

Is it a solution? They found a case where the equations produced an impossible answer - infinite velocity. It’s also unclear how close 2 human mathematicians were, using AI tools.

Sounds like they were close enough to me. Like a power tools company watching someone build a house, having an intern sneak up and slap in the last nail, and then claiming the nailgun built the house on its own.

Similarly with Anthropic "discovering" enzymes that a scientist was using Claude to analyze:

https://www.business-standard.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/did-anthropic-s-ai-really-make-a-scientific-discovery-on-its-own-126092800073_1.html

As useful as I think these tools are, I want to slap whatever corporate jackasses think pulling this ◊◊◊◊ for a PR blurb is in any way a good idea.

 

[NatalieSalat]

I still find it extremely distasteful that you're altering a person's image without their permission or the permission of their estate.

This is one of the huge problems with AI - that it permits and even encourages this kind of invasive alteration. How would you like it if I asked AI to change an image of you so that you're wearing a Nazi uniform? It's extremely unethical, and I don't think it should be permitted on this forum.

Mine wwas well-intentioned. AI img gen = a present-day version of CSO/Chromakey

 

[Skeptical Greg]

Mine wwas well-intentioned.

And we all know about good intentions.

 

[NatalieSalat]

This is "what if the BB in the White House TVM actors had looked the correct age for Season 1 of the TV show, where it supposed to be set (Cindy's 'Buffy' do etc.)" (e.g. Shelley Long wasn't 54 at the time).

 

[Dr.Sid]

Is it a solution? They found a case where the equations produced an impossible answer - infinite velocity. It’s also unclear how close 2 human mathematicians were, using AI tools.


OpenAI then threw millions of dollars of computer time at it.

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-ai-math-breakthrough-ignited-controversy

The problem was: prove it's stable or show case where it's not. AI showed the later. Those two might have been close. Or not. We will never know. They proved the same on simpler case. Their solution is also vortex based, but otherwise quite different. And yes, it was expensive. But it is certainly huge milestone for AI.

 

[Andy_Ross]

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com%2Fpost%2F3mwllpss6gx2s

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com%2Fpost%2F3mwlls4c7l72g

 

[theprestige]

This is "what if the BB in the White House TVM actors had looked the correct age for Season 1 of the TV show, where it supposed to be set (Cindy's 'Buffy' do etc.)" (e.g. Shelley Long wasn't 54 at the time).



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Why are you so intent on bringing an AI into a conversation between humans? Do you think this is what other people want from you?