Thinking Like an AI

LLMs use a statistical model of language, they do not pull from a database. So the more common a piece of work is in the training data, the more likely the AI is to “recall” that data accurately when prompted. You can see this at work when I give it a sentence from the most fiction common book in its training data - Alice in Wonderland . It gets th

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once the AI has written something, it cannot go back, so it needs to justify (or explain or lie about) that statement in the future

AI is not pulling from a database, it is guessing the next word based on statistical patterns in its training data. That means that what it produces is not necessarily true (in fact, one of many surprises about LLMs are how often they are right, given this), but, even when it provides false information, it likely sounds plausible. That makes it har... See more

you will realize that AI accomplishes impressive outcomes that, intuitively, we would not expect from an autocomplete system.