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> If you "saw" [a three-legged chicken] in real life, you'd probably rub your eyes and discount it too.

Huh? I'd assume it's a mutant, not store a memory of having seen a perfectly normal chicken

You've never seen someone who's missing a finger or has only a half-grown arm or something? Surely you didn't assume your eyes were tricking you?! Or... if you did, I guess you can't answer this question. I'm actually racking my brain for how to logic this out but I'm just going to bank on that it's likely that anyone over 20yo saw an animal with some visible deviation from the norm at some point in their life




You've seen people with missing limbs without being surprised, because you know how they can become lost, but you rarely see one with additional limbs. Their likelihoods and our consequent priors are drastically different.

Also, your reaction will depend on how strong the evidence is. Did you 'see' the three-legged chicken pass by some bush in the distance, or was it right in front of you?


But to be clear, in this case the LLM has a full, direct, unobscured view of the chicken. A human, in that specific case -- i.e. looking at the same photo* -- would not have trouble discerning and reporting the third leg. Perhaps if they were forced to scan the photo quickly and make a report, or were otherwise not really 'paying attention'/'taking it seriously', but the mere fact that LLMs fall into that regime far more than an 'serious employee' already shows that they fail in different ways than humans do.


There's a first time you see everything you don't know how to explain.




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