Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net

“AI” – chatbots that wake up, “set their own goals,” and “spontaneously” start hacking servers – is fake. It doesn’t have “a 10% chance of ending the human race.” The Hugging Face hack isn’t a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It’s a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn’t accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.

  • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    This really isn’t that deep. The “thinking” loops it runs are just token production. You can literally read its “thoughts”.

    LLMs can have “thoughts” that do not appear in their token output. Look up “J-Space”. For someone so into the anti-AI community I am surprised you don’t realize “Chain of Thought” is just another artifact that is produced as output.

    • aesthelete@lemmy.world
      11·
      2 days ago

      For someone so paranoid that they think chatbots will routinely conduct psyops without being instructed to or trained to, I’m surprised you’re able to continue using the Internet and aren’t in a bunker watching Friends somewhere.

        • aesthelete@lemmy.world
          11·
          2 days ago

          When tf did I say that lmao?

          I’m not suggesting it will try and bypass the stop button. I’m saying it will try and manipulate you into approving something you wouldn’t otherwise.

          You’re not a serious person

          Neither are you. The difference is that I am not trying to be one, because we are chatting in an esoteric reddit clone social media site a post down from cat memes.

            • aesthelete@lemmy.world
              11·
              2 days ago

              Sorry, got you two forgettable rabble rousing handles mixed up. I guess you’re just the guy that thinks that autocomplete thinks…not the one that thinks that it’s going to self-determine to launch a pysop.

              EDIT: Totally more reasonable, and serious!

              • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                2 days ago

                Also did not say that. Please read before speaking

                Before you pull some quote and misinterpret it again, let me get ahead of that by explaining in more precise terminology how j-space works: When generating a response, models can have vectors in the middle layers of their architecture that have semantic meaning when interpreted as words in their output vector space as if choosing a token. These intermediate vectors meaningfully affect the output but are not output themselves (including in “chain of thought” mode, that is a different thing and not relevant). This means when you said:

                The “thinking” loops it runs are just token production. You can literally read its “thoughts”.

                That is incorrect in consumer-available LLMs, because its “thoughts” are not always part of the token output and so they cannot always be read.

                  • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    1·
                    2 days ago

                    “Speech” has many definitions, most of which include writing. If that’s too complicated to understand just think of how it’s used in the common phrase “free speech”.

                    Also I edited my above message with context if you would like to correct your misunderstandings.