Re: Word choice "recognizing" (Was: Re: LaTeX for prompting AI?)

Greetings.

On 2025-07-10 07:26, Tristan Wibberley wrote:
>> [Just now, ChatGPT] had no problem recognizing equations written in 
>> LaTeX markup.
>    ^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> Normally people say things like "understanding" which you've avoided, of 
> course it's not right for an LLM, but "recognizing" also implies mind 
> via "cognize". Is "recognizing" an accepted technical term for LLMs or 
> should we say "predicting from" ?

It's true that using the term "understand" with reference to what LLMs 
do has been stigmatized, but I haven't encountered any similar 
proscriptions for "recognize".  The latter term has been used 
academically in the context of AI systems since long before the advent 
of LLMs, and has even become entrenched in popular usage through terms 
such as "speech recognition" and "facial recognition".  There are even 
plenty of computational but non-AI uses going back to the 1950s -- books 
and articles write of computers "recognizing" magnetically encoded bits 
on a storage medium, or symbols in a computer program, or numbers within 
a certain range.

Regards,
Tristan

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                   Tristan Miller
Free Software developer, ferret herder, logologist
              https://logological.org/
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