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She won an exemption from using AI at her tech job. The Pope's remarks could fuel similar appeals. (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 22 points 2 months ago (1 child)

(The AI does not, in fact, understand it. The AI doesn't understand anything at all. It's a statistical text prediction machine.)

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    That is correct, but it's also kinda beside the point. A compiler doesn't "understand" anything either, it's just a program, but it's still very useful. So useful in fact that most programmers nowadays trust it unconditionally to the point where we say "a programmer doesn't need to understand the code the compiler outputs".

    But AI is just really not trustworthy, and the question is whether they will ever be trustworthy enough that we can say "The programmer doesn't need to understand the code the AI outputs".

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  • [+] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago*

    Of course. That's why we trust it. My point was that a tool doesn't need to have "understanding" (whatever that exactly means) to be useful, it needs consistency.

    The compiler doesn't understand. It converts, following strict rules. There's no "thinking" or "understanding" in the process. It's a pure one-to-one conversion. That makes it consistent. If I run the same code twice through the same compiler I will get the same output. It's an output that I can trust and thus using a compiler is helpful.

    If an AI was able to consistently, dependably, provably convert my natural text input into a correct program, then I'd also be able to trust it.

    The problem is that this is technically impossible, because the whole point of using natural text input is that I can use vague, unclear and incomplete language to describe what I want. With an ambiguous input there cannot be an unambiguous output.

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