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Comment by xigoi

1 day ago

Would you trust the tool that recommended putting glue on pizza to give you a good recipe?

I have/make rice starch glue. Can you put it on food? How are you supposed to know whether it's food safe?

Okay, so you don't trust LLM, so you go to a website instead. And... LLM-generated pages are SEO'd to get the top links. So you can't trust any website now (shoot, so much nonsense even before LLM, just more obvious to some of us). So basically everything on a computer is untrustworthy, directly from an LLM or not, unless you got yourself a copy of Encarta '97.

So you pick up a book at the local library. Librarians picked some books to order in subject matters they aren't expert in. How do you know those are accurate and safe? If the book says to use rice starch glue, how do you know the author didn't just copy that from an LLM? Or make it up?

Trust is fading entirely.

  • Presumably you test some things and use common sense for others. Like if you search for "grain filling oak" using an engine like Kagi(because Google just sells you the same product repackaged over and over) then you'll get people telling you variously to buy this grain filler compound that worked on their particular project, or you get people telling you to use drywall patch compound, or watered down wood filler.

    The thing is, these things do produce some kind of result that looks like what you want. But it is still up to you to test these things on a project before you rely on them for whatever it is you really wanted them for, and that requirement doesn't go away just because you sourced the information from some LLM, or a book at the library, or Nick Offerman, or whoever else.

If the user puts glue on their pizza because a computer said so, that's a human problem.

The computer generated recipes can be useful as inspiration, but of course common sense is required.

  • This "common sense" you refer to, is it the same common sense Babbage was subject to?

    "On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

    ~ Charles Babbage

Got anything from 2025 or 2026?

AI got better over the last couple of years, and you didn't keep up, and because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.

  • The fundamental technology is still the same, just with more fossil fuel burning.

    > because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.

    How? Will it stop being possible to cook without AI?

    • The fundamental technology is still the same, just with more fossil fuel burning.

      That's like saying the fundamental technology behind an Egger-Lohner Hybrid and a Prius are the same. Technically true, but if you use that truth as a basis for decisionmaking, you're doomed. A modern AI model wouldn't make such a foolish mistake, so you'd better not make it yourself.

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