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Anne Hathaway says she was spammed with ChatGPT-written thank you notes after hiring for a recent role: "Nobody on that list gets that job" (fortune.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 6 points 4 months ago (24 children)

Something is wrong here, LLMs won't spit out the same word-for-word response for the same prompt that's not how they work.

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  • [–] 21 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    It's probably not the same word for word, but with very similar structures. And LLMs tend to structure the text in very similar ways that don't feel quite right.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    The article said they were the "exact same".

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Some reporters tend to take hyperbole too literally.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    It seems a more likely that the candidates were cutting and pasting a standard response, either way my point was to question the integrity of the article, which seems itself to be AI slop anyway.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (18 children)

    You are right, but you are also wrong. If they’re given the same seed, they certainly will. They are 100% deterministic. But in reality, the seed is randomly generated, so yeah, it won’t be exactly the same every time.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Even if they had the same seed, they would all need the exact same prompt. The chances of multiple people all independently coming up with the exact same prompt is highly unlikely.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Please read the last sentence of my comment. I am not saying that the interpretation is wrong, I’m saying the statement that that’s not how LLMs work is wrong. That is how LLMs work. They are deterministic. The only reason they don’t do that in practice is because we purposefully seed them with random data to make them not do that.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (15 children)

    Where was I wrong? I said nothing that contradicts the detail you added.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago* (14 children)

    LLMs won't spit out the same word-for-word response for the same prompt

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (4 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.

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  • [–] -2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months 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.

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  • [+] 2 points 4 months ago (8 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (7 children)

    How did you possibly get that from what I said? Are you purposefully being as uncharitable as possible?

    No, I clearly was not talking about this situation. I was clarifying how your interpretation was correct, but you were factually incorrect.

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  • [+] 0 points 4 months ago (6 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

    It’s called pedantry, and I have never failed to own it. At this point, I feel like you’re trying to be overly abrasive.

    Was it not your interpretation that the messages seem to not be from LLMs, because they’re identical? Because that’s literally what you said.

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  • [+] 1 point 4 months ago (3 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Fair enough. Still, why would you misrepresent my view so radically unless you were being uncharitable on purpose?

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  • [+] 2 points 4 months ago* (1 child)
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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago

    People confuse LLMs for being non-deterministic all the time. The comment implied that. I want people to understand that LLMs are deterministic, because I don’t want people confusing them with actual intelligence or some sort of “black magic”. But sure man, whatever excuse you need to be an asshole to a stranger.

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