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

On 10/07/2025 09:38, Tristan Miller wrote:
> Greetings.
> 
> On 2025-07-10 07:26, Tristan Wibberley wrote:
>>> [Just now, ChatGPT] had no problem recognizing equations written in
>>> LaTeX markup.

>> ... "recognizing" ... implies mind via "cognize". Is "recognizing"
>> an accepted technical term for LLMs or should we say "predicting from"
>> ?

> ["recognize"] 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.

  Thanks for the detailed and helpful response.

  It seems those uses of "recognize" and "recognition" are specifically
for classification and, typically, classification of an input as a
representation of a specific symbol.

  Do you find that normally a face is said to be recognized when the
system provides a name, classified when it provides a species, detected
when it provides an assertion of presence?

  I wonder if "recognize" is properly applied to LLM prediction of a
statement that asserts a specific member of a class rather than for just
any useful prediction or for prediction of any classifying statement in
general?


  That continues to raise some interesting questions. If you ask "is
[code] latex?" and the system responds "yes", did it even get as far as
'classifying' the code as latex? Did the system merely admit it to a
"similar-to-latex" set rather than discriminating the code from other
things from which you would expect it to be discriminated when it is
classified?

--
Tristan