Comment by ericmay
1 day ago
> Or, it will acknowledge that it made a mistake and continue to make the same mistake again.
People do this too though. At least the AI generally tries to follow instructions that you give it even when you are lacking clarity in the details.
I feel like it's similar to the self-driving car problem. The car could have 99.9999% reliability, drive much better and safer than a human, yet folks will still freak out about a single mistake that's made even though you have actual humans today driving the wrong way down the highway, crashing in to buildings, drunk driving, stealing cars, and all sorts of other just absolutely stupid things.
We need to move away from this idea that because it's an AI system it should give you perfect responses. It's not a deterministic system and it can be wrong, though it should get better over time. Your Google search results are wrong all the time too. The NYT writes things that are factually incorrect. Why do we have such a high standard for these models when we don't apply them elsewhere?
>I corrected it with links
it should be reasonably expected that you can give a source and fix an error in the AI output.
I would even go as far as to say if a human directly told the AI "no, use 7.6 as the latest version", the AI should absolutely follow direct instructions no matter what it thinks is true. What if this human was working on a slide about the upcoming release of 7.6 that has no public documentation?
> Your Google search results are wrong all the time too. The NYT writes things that are factually incorrect.
This is also very bad and people complain about these things all the fucking time.
> Why do we have such a high standard for these models
Because Altman and Amodei are defrauding investors out of hundreds of billions of dollars on the promise that they will replace the entire workforce. Of course people are going to point out the emperor has no clothes when half of our society is engaged in mass hysteria worshipping these fucking things as the next industrial revolution, diverting massive amounts of resources to them, and ruining HN with 10 articles on the front page per day about how software engineering is dead.
> ruining HN with 10 articles on the front page per day about how software engineering is dead.
Even this article, which is theoretically about playing games on a MacBook and not about AI, has devolved into AI discussions. It's honestly kind of tiring.
I suppose the article invites it by putting an AI blurb up top, and I suppose I'm also not helping by adding my own comment, but _still_.
> This is also very bad and people complain about these things all the fucking time.
So at worst these AI tools are as bad as the existing system. Worth complaining about? Absolutely. Worth holding to much higher standards? Nah I don't think so. Not at this stage at least. And folks are just disappointing themselves by setting up straw men expectations.
These tools are non-deterministic systems (like humans) which sometimes don't do exactly what you want (like humans) but are also extremely fast, much cheaper (for now), and have domain knowledge generation that is much broader than any single human has. Like anything else, there are pros and cons.
They aren't "straw man expectations" when the entire US economy is now oriented around those expectations.
I see a lot of angry responses in your replies, but I do think you have a good point. It seems like those arguing with you are mostly vigorously opposing a strawman: the idea that AI is perfect and that trusting AI to be perfect is the right move. Only crazy people think that, though.
For me, I ask AI questions about taxes and my health all the time. In the case of taxes, getting a basic handle on the relevant tax law is made 1000 times easier. I can always refer directly to the IRS publications to verify, once I know what I’m looking for.
For health, frankly, it would be impractical for me to ever get as much useful information from doctors as what I can easily get from AI. Four years ago, I would have a bunch of health questions and simply never know the answers to any of them because I would have nobody to ask. Now I get them all answered, and if I were to be suggested to actually do anything that sounded even slightly risky I’d go to the doctor, armed with much more context than I had before, to verify it.
The NYT writes things that are factually incorrect. Why do we have such a high standard for these models when we don't apply them elsewhere?
The New York Times publishes a "corrections" section in each issue. Let me know where I can view the 60TB file where ChatGPT fesses up to its daily fails.
"Things exist as they are today and can't possible change or improve in the future".
People lie all the time too. You're just radicalizing yourself to create a bias for no reason other than concocting a straw man expectation that you made up for yourself. What's the point of that?