As if a huge chunk of genre section wasn’t already as formulaic as if it was written by AI
Every time I think people have reached maximum stupidity they prove me wrong.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Albert Einstein (supposedly)
I had to explain to three separate family members what it means for an Ai to hallucinate. The look of terror on their faces after is proof that people have no idea how “smart” a LLM chatbot is. They have been probably using one at work for a year thinking they are accurate.
I legitimately don’t understand how someone can interact with an LLM for more than 30 minutes and come away from it thinking that it’s some kind of super intelligence or that it can be trusted as a means of gaining knowledge without external verification. Do they just not even consider the possibility that it might not be fully accurate and don’t bother to test it out? I asked it all kinds of tough and ambiguous questions the day I got access to ChatGPT and very quickly found inaccuracies, common misconceptions, and popular but ideologically motivated answers. For example, I don’t know if this is still like this but if you ask ChatGPT questions about who wrote various books of the Bible, it will give not only the traditional view, but specifically the evangelical Christian view on most versions of these questions. This makes sense because they’re extremely prolific writers, but it’s simply wrong to reply “Scholars generally believe that the Gospel of Mark was written by a companion of Peter named John Mark” because this view hasn’t been favored in academic biblical studies for over 100 years, even though it is traditional. Similarly, asking it questions about early Islamic history gets you the religious views of Ash’ari Sunni Muslims and not the general scholarly consensus.
The results I get from chatgpt half the time are pretty bad. If I ask for simple code it is pretty good but ask it about how something works? Nope. All I need to do is slightly rephrase the question and I can get a totally different answer.
I have a friend who constantly sends me videos that get her all riled up. Half the time I patiently explain to her why a video is likely AI or faked some other way. “Notice how it never says where it is taking place? Notice how they never give any specific names?” Fortunately she eventually agrees with me but I feel like I’m teaching critical thinking 101. I then think of the really stupid people out there who refuse to listen to reason.
Idk how anyone searches the internet anymore. Search engines all turn up so I ask an AI. Maybe one out of 20 times it turns up what I’m asking for better than a search engine. The rest of the time it runs me in circles that don’t work and wastes hours. So then I go back to the search engine and find what I need buried 20 pages deep.
I’ve asked it for a solution to something and it gives me A. I tell it A doesn’t work so it says “Of course!” and gives me B. Then I tell it B doesn’t work and it gives me A…
No AI needed for that. These bloody librarians wouldn’t let us have the Necronomicon either. Selfish bastards…
The Simpsons showed us the danger of the occult section in the library.
I swear, librarians are the only thing standing between humanity and true greatness!
There’s only the One High and Mighty who can bring true greatness to humanity! Praise Cthulhu!
Well maybe if people could just say the three words right, they wouldn’t need to.
This one is on you. MY copy of the necronomicon firmly sits in my library in the west wing…
it sits on whatever shelf it sees fit to sit on, on any given day.
I guess Thomas Fullman was right: “When humans find wisdom in cold replicas of themselves, the arrow of evolution will bend into a circle”. That’s from Automating the Mind. One of his best.
Everyone knows that AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini can often hallucinate sources.
No, no, apparently not everyone, or this wouldn’t be a problem.
In hindsight, I’m really glad that the first time I ever used an LLM it gave me demonstrably false info. That demolished the veneer of trustworthiness pretty quickly.
There’s an old Monty Python sketch from 1967 that comes to mind when people ask a librarian for a book that doesn’t exist.
They predicted the future.
Thanks for this, I hadn’t seen this one!
I plugged my local AI into offline wikipedia expecting a source of truth to make it way way better.
It’s better, but I also can’t tell when it’s making up citations now, because it uses Wikipedia to support its own world view from pre training instead of reality.
So it’s not really much better.
Hallucinations become a bigger problem the more info they have (that you now have to double check)
At my work, we don’t allow it to make citations. We instruct it to add in placeholders for citations instead, which allows us to hunt down the info, ensure it’s good info, and then add it in ourselves.
That’s still looking for sources that fit a predetermined conclusion, not real research
Yup.
In some instances that’s sufficient though, depending on how much precision you need for what you do. Regardless, you have to review it no matter what it produces.
That probably makes sense.
I haven’t played around since the initial shell shock of “oh god it’s worse now”
Good article with many links to other interesting articles. Acts like a good summary for the situation this year.
I didn’t know about the MAHA thing, but I guess I’m not surprised. It’s hard to know how much is incompetence and idiocy and how much is malicious.
Everybody knows the world is full of stupid people.
