Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Most humans are aware that adding Elmer's glue to pizza cheese to "get the cheese to stick" is a humorous statement that would not work in reality, despite the fact that "glue" makes things "sticky." This should provide ample evidence that humans do better than LLMs here.



I used Claude 3 Sonnet against the cheese sliding off prompt and it gave sensible responses such as "let it cool, don't put so many toppings on it" and no hint of glue. Then again, I'm finding Anthropic to be a better steward of LLM hype than most other companies, which may be why I use Claude 3 in my company.


"Glue makes things sticky but it's evident it can't be put on a pizza" is the new "Chloroquine kills viruses but it's evident it can't be ingested". Still, someone died because he trusted a prominent idiot politician suggestion like he was an expert in medicine.

Some people will trust AI as much as they trust the strong man in power, no matter how obtuse that man is, and one day someone will eventually die or be seriously harmed because of a wrong advice by AI; Google should turn off that nonsense for good before someone is harmed.


Humans are trained that glue is not to be eaten. It's a meme even that young children eat glue. The example you give is exactly something Humans are trained for.


It's a meme because it's unusual, eating glue is a shorthand for having low intelligence because most humans don't eat glue. Beyond that, most humans understand that given the way glue works and given the way cheese works the premise of using glue to make cheese stick to a pizza doesn't even make sense, thus the statement is immediately understood as a pun, not a credible attempt at a recipe.

If humans were no better than LLMs in the way that this input were processed, there would be no meme, nor would there be a thread about how ridiculous Google's LLM is. Humans would simply accept as fact that glue can be added to pizza to make the cheese stickier, because the words make syntactic sense. Yet here we are.


I expect that humans would accept that glue is acceptable to add to pizza if we were not taught otherwise. Look at smoking, arguably worse then eating some types of glue, yet for a large part of human history this was normal and not even seen as unhealthy.

And yet, of course, now people think it's obvious that inhaling the burnt remains of some plant might not be so healthy.


>I expect that humans would accept that glue is acceptable to add to pizza if we were not taught otherwise.

That's doubtful, since pizza isn't improved upon with the addition of glue, and (again) because the premise that glue can make pizza cheese "stick" is absurd on its face. Humans don't simply add random ingredients to their food for no reason, or because no one taught them to do otherwise. There is process, aesthetic, culture and art behind the way food is designed and prepared. it needs to at least taste good. Glue covered pizza wouldn't taste good.

>Look at smoking, arguably worse then eating some types of glue, yet for a large part of human history this was normal and not even seen as unhealthy.

Again, the relative health benefits of glue or lack thereof is not the reason people don't use glue on pizza, nor is it why people consider the LLM's statement of a joke presented as fact to be absurd or exceptional.

>And yet, of course, now people think it's obvious that inhaling the burnt remains of some plant might not be so healthy.

And yet, there are also plenty of people who don't.

You just keep proving my point. There are layers of complexity and nuance to the human interpretation of all of this that simply don't exist with LLMs. The fact that we're here discussing it at all is evidence that a distinct difference exists between human cognition and LLMs.

I can see that you're deeply invested in the narrative that LLMs are functionally equivalent to humans, a lot of people seem to be. I don't know why. It isn't necessary, even with a maximalist stance on AI. But if you literally believe something as absurd as "humans would accept that glue is acceptable to add to pizza if we were not taught otherwise" and that, therefore, there is nothing wrong with an LLM presenting that as a fact, because humans and LLMs process information in exactly the same way, then I don't know what to tell you. You live in a completely different reality than I do, and I'm not going to waste any more of my time trying to explain color to the blind.


Interpretation has nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence without context is often exactly what AI is.


The meme started as eating paste, back when that meant wheatpaste (made from flour and water). In that context it's less surprising that kids might try to eat it!

I wonder if there's been a bit of a conflation with the other meme, about sniffing glue, which has also lost much of its context considering that rubber cement and other similar types of glue which contain volatile solvents are also less widely used than they once were.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: