My definition of artificial is a system that was consciously engineered by humans.

And humans consciously decided what data to include, consciously created most of the data themselves, and consciously annotated the data for training. Conscious decisions are all over the dataset, even if they didn’t design the neural network directly from the ground up. The system still evolved from conscious inputs, you can’t erase its roots and call it natural.

Human-like object concept representations emerge from datasets made by humans because humans made them.

I’m saying that the terms “natural” and “artificial” are in a dialectical relationship, they define each other by their contradictions. Those words don’t mean anything once you include everything humans do as natural; you’ve effectively defined “artificial” out of existence and as a result also defined “natural” out of existence.

If we define human inputs as “natural” then the word basically ceases to mean anything.

It’s the equivalent of saying that paintings and sculptures emerge naturally because artists are human and humans are natural.

LLMs create a useful representation of the world that is similar to our own when we feed them our human created+human curated+human annotated data. This doesn’t tell us much about the nature of large language models nor the nature of object concept representations, what it tells us is that human inputs result in human-like outputs.

Claims about “nature” are much broader than the findings warrant. We’d need to see LLMs fed entirely non-human datasets (no human creation, no human curation, no human annotation) before we could make claims about what emerges naturally.

I’m not disputing this, but I also don’t see why that’s important.

What’s important the use of “natural” here, because it implies something fundamental about language and material reality, rather than this just being a reflection of the human data fed into the model. You did it yourself when you said:

If you evolved a neural network on raw data from the environment, it would eventually start creating similar types of representations as well because it’s an efficient way to model the world.

And we just don’t know this, and this paper doesn’t demonstrate this because (as I’ve said) we aren’t feeding the LLMs raw data from the environment. We’re feeding them inputs from humans and then they’re displaying human-like outputs.

Did you actually read through the paper?

From the paper:

to what extent can complex, task-general psychological representations emerge without explicit task-specific training, and how do these compare to human cognitive processes across abroad range of tasks and domains?

But their training is still a data set picked by humans and given textual descriptions made by humans and then used a representation learning method previously designed for human participants. That’s not “natural”, that’s human.

A more accurate conclusion would be: human-like object concept representations emerge when fed data collected by humans, curated by humans, annotated by humans, and then tested by representation learning methods designed for humans.

human in ➡️ human out

I didn’t say they’re encoding raw data from nature

Ultimately the data both human brains and artificial neural networks are trained on comes from the material reality we inhabit.

Anyway, the data they are getting not only comes in a human format. The data we record is only recorded because we find meaningful as humans and most of the data is generated entirely by humans besides. You can’t separate these things; they’re human-like because they’re human-based.

It’s not merely natural. It’s human.

If you evolved a neural network on raw data from the environment, it would eventually start creating similar types of representations as well because it’s an efficient way to model the world.

We don’t know that.

We know that LLMs, when fed human-like inputs, produce human-like outputs. That’s it. That tells us more about LLMs and humans than it tells us about nature itself.

LLMs are not getting raw data from nature. They’re being fed data produced by us and uploaded into their database: human writings and human observations and human categorizations and human judgements about what data is valuable. All the data about our reality that we feed them is from a human perspective.

This is a feature, and will make them more useful to us, but I’m just arguing that raw natural data won’t naturally produce human-like outputs. Instead, human inputs produce human-like outputs.

But it’s emerging from networks of data from humans, which means our object concept representation is in the data. This isn’t random data, after all, it comes from us. Seems like the LLMs are just regurgitating what we’re feeding them.

What this shows, I think, is how deeply we are influencing the data we feed to LLMs. They’re human-based models and so they produce human-like outputs.

Isn’t this just because LLMs use the object concept representation data from actual humans?

I just don’t see the utility of spreading propaganda to 0.5% of English speakers. It’s such a vanishingly small viewership that it is almost entirely irrelevant. I guess they did the math and calculated that it’s worth the cost, but I don’t see it.

I’m not even sure why they bother making English language media at all?

Although “tree” is a common word, there is no universally recognised precise definition of what a tree is, either botanically or in common language.[1][2] In its broadest sense, a tree is any plant with the general form of an elongated stem, or trunk, which supports the photosynthetic leaves or branches at some distance above the ground.

Well damn, I guess strawberries can be trees and nuts.

Peanuts claim to be nuts, but they aren’t a legumtimate part of the taxonomy.

I dunno.

Like cashews!

I thought nuts had to come from trees, though.

Like, peanuts aren’t actually nuts.

Israel is murdering and starving women right now.

For those unaware. CW: Israeli war crimes, SA, torture, etc

Iran has a right to defend itself. 🫡

Correct, but marketing (really, propaganda) is part of how capitalism reproduces itself.

Most people live in Plato’s Cave and their entire reality is constructed by marketing.

Hamas wanted hostages, not bodies.

Don’t give an inch. The brutality came from the Israeli side. They fired on their own people to stop them from being taken hostage.