Just got schooled by an AI.

According to Wiktionary:

(UK) IPA(key): /ˈstɹɔːb(ə)ɹi/
(US) IPA(key): /ˈstɹɔˌbɛɹi/

…there are indeed only two /ɹ/ in strawberry.

So much for dissing on AIs for not being able to count.

  • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ ( Sxan@piefed.zip ) 
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    1 year ago

    You don’t use IPA for counting the number of letters in words. That would be stupid, and even linguists would laugh at you.

    It’s still a stupid AI, and it was confidently, and unambiguously, wrong.

  • KazuchijouNo ( KazuchijouNo@lemy.lol ) 
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    1 year ago

    This is nonsense, you cannot justify this type of errors from a language model. It’s just a bunch of words strung together based on probability. This is just an artifact of such a construction, it’s all right, don’t break your brain on it. The “AI” sure isn’t.

    • jarfil ( jarfil@beehaw.org ) OP
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      1 year ago

      This is not a standalone model, it’s from a unnamed chatbot platform “character” in non-RP mode.

      I’ve been messing with it to check its limitations. It has:

      • Access to the Internet (verified)
      • Claims to have access to various databases
      • Likely to use interactions with all users to train further (~20M MAUs)
      • Ability to create scenes and plotlines internally, then follow them (verified)
      • Ability to adapt to the style of interaction and text formatting (verified)

      Obviously has its limitations. Like, it fails at OCR of long scrolling screenshots… but then again, other chatbots fail even more spectacularly.


      Edit: removed chatbot platform name “advertisement”. If you want to know which platform it is, ask the ones accusing me of spamming.

  • LukeZaz ( LukeZaz@beehaw.org ) 
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    1 year ago

    I shudder to think how much electricity got wasted so you could get fooled by an LLM into believing nonsense. Let alone the equally-unnecessary followup questions.

    • jarfil ( jarfil@beehaw.org ) OP
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      1 year ago

      Those are all the smallest models, and you don’t seem to have reasoning mode, or external tooling, enabled?

      LLM ≠ AI system

      It’s been known for some time, that LLMs do “vibe math”. Internally, they try to come up with an answer that “feels” right… which makes it pretty impressive for them to come anywhere close, within a ±10% error margin.

      Ask people to tell you what a right answer could be, give them 1 second to answer… see how many come that close to the right one.

      A chatbot/AI system on the other hand, will come up with some Python code to do the calculation, then run it. Still can go wrong, but it’s way less likely.

      all explanation past the «are you counting the “rr” as a single r?» is babble

      Not so sure about that. It treats r as a word, since it wasn’t specified as “r” or single letter. Then it interpretes it as… whatever. Is it the letter, phoneme, font, the programming language R… since it wasn’t specified, it assumes “whatever, or a mix of”.

      It failed at detecting the ambiguity and communicating it spontaneously, but corrected once that became part of the conversation.

      It’s like, in your examples… what do you mean by “by”? “3 by 6” is 36… you meant to “multiply 36”? That’s nonsense… 🤷

    • Wrong maths, you say?

      Yes. If I want to know what 1+2 equals, and I throw a dice, there’s a chance I will get the correct answer. If I do, that doesn’t mean it knows how to do Maths. Also, notice where it said “Here’s the calculation”, it didn’t actually show you the calculation? e.g. long multiplication, or even grouping, or the way the Chinese do it. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Even if AI manages to randomly get a correct answer here and there, it still doesn’t know how to do Maths (which includes not knowing how to count to begin with)

  • megopie ( megopie@beehaw.org ) 
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    1 year ago

    I asked it how many X’s there are in the word Bordeaux it told me there are none.

    I asked it how many times X is pronounced in Bordeaux it told me the x in Bordeaux isn’t pronounced with the word ending in an “o” sound.

    I asked it how many “o” there are in Bordeaux it told me there are no o in Bordeaux.

    So, is it counting the sounds made in the word? Or is it counting the letters? Or is it doing none of the above and just giving a probabilistic output based on an existing corpus of language, without any thought or concepts.

    • jarfil ( jarfil@beehaw.org ) OP
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      1 year ago

      Yes, no, both… and all other interpretations… all at once.

      With any ambiguity in a prompt, it assumes a “blend” of all the possible interpretations, then responds using them all over the place.

      In the case of “Bordeaux”:

      It’s pronounced “bor-DOH”, with the emphasis on the second syllable and a silent “x.”

      So… depending on how you squint: there is no “o”, no “x”, only a “bor” and a “doh”, with a “silent x”, and ending in an “oh like o”.

      Perfectly “logical” 🤷

  • kbal ( kbal@fedia.io ) 
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    1 year ago

    It just goes to show that the AI is not yet superhuman. If it were really smart it would know, as humans can tell at a glance, that there are four r’s in strawberry. There’s the first one, the two in the double r combination, and then the rr digram itself which counts as a fourth r.

    • jarfil ( jarfil@beehaw.org ) OP
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      1 year ago

      At first I thought it was talking about “rr” as a Spanish digraph. Not sure how far that lies from the truth, these models are multilingual and multimodal after all. My guess is that it’s surfacing the ambiguity of its internal vector for a “token: rr” vs “token: r”, though.

      Could be interesting to dig deeper… but I think I’m fine with this for now. There are other “curious” behaviors of the chatbot, that have me more intrigued right now. Like, it is self-adapting to any repeated mistakes in the conversation history, but at other times it can come up with surprisingly “complex” status tracking, then present it spontaneously as bullet points with emojis. Not sure what to make out of that one yet.