i’ll bite.

a magic 8 ball is a twenty sided die and a magnifying glass.

any supervisor can roll the die until they see all twenty possible answers.

a magic 8 ball has infinite questions with 20 finite answers.

a GPT by definition has infinite answers as they are derived on demand by infinite questions, therefore, it can no longer be considered a magic 8 ball.

"Magic 8 ball" is obviously a metaphor about how an LLM's output has little connection with reality. You also don't take an LLM in your hands and shake it to make it produce output.

“therefore” is the context in this part of the thread, as the comment i was replying to was honing in on that, the magic 8 ball needing to be a magic 8 ball and not a metaphor. they got confused about how though they’re both disconnected from reality, one still has roots in probability theory and can reasoned about by an adult supervisor, whereas the other one is so divorced from reality that the phrase “magic 8 ball” ceases to lose meaning and must be pedantically debated on an internet forum before they can decide it isn’t something they should give their kids, like a magic 8 ball.

But the other person said that the LLM can no longer be considered a magic 8 ball not because it's much more divorced from reality, but because its guardrails are failing. If it was just a matter of disconnection then the metaphor was never appropriate to begin with (although I disagree that LLMs are much more divorced from reality than magic 8 balls). The, by my interpretation, non sequitur is that a guardrailed magic 8 ball that has imperfect guardrails is no longer a magic 8 ball, even though by default magic 8 balls don't have guardrails; a magic 8 ball may very well tell you that it's a good idea to do something recklessly stupid and dangerous.

i defined the guard rails of a magic 8 ball as being a twenty sided probability problem.

what position are you even standing for right now?

My “therefore” had less to do with technical details and more the legality of it. If magic 8 ball was marketed to children and company claimed that it was for children, then there would be stricter scrutiny around the answers it spits out. In this country, when you build products for children and market it to them, you undergo a much closer scrutiny than if you have an identical product that puts a disclaimer of “18+ only”.