Comment by economistbob
20 hours ago
The problem is that humans start with credulity. AI hallucinates and makes up stuff some percentage of the time. Humans are not "default deny" when given information. Unleashing that was a disservice to mankind and has created a future filled with lies and people who are confident in them.
LLMs are in essence an attack on the concept of written language, harvesting and dissolving the social contract that underpins it; it is no longer safe to assume that text has intent, let alone content, simply because it is grammatically well-formed.
Perhaps the most darkly amusing consequence of this particular mania is that by poisoning the majority of our information environment with hallucinated slop, we have likely crippled the next several generations of machine-learning techniques before they're even invented! Small, locally-hostable LLMs will rattle along spewing spam long after the broader "genai bubble" pops, and building clean training datasets will permanently be more difficult and expensive.
Oh, to be technically correct:
AI hallucinates and makes up stuff 100% percent of the time. Never been a fan of that word for this.
Again, I fail to see the problem here that isn't solved by careful reading WHICH IS WHAT PEOPLE SHOULD BE DOING ANYWAY. I would like to see room for AI disclosure, maybe a statement of "this is how much AI I used."
But this blanket X% of this looks like AI? Again, so what?
If as a primary school student you had needed to reverify every fact /experiment that was presented in your textbooks, you would not have gotten very far.
Trust is very important to human progress.
I find the fact that 39% of papers use a style that signals lack of effort somewhat worrisome. Even if that’s 100% wrong, and they’re all high effort papers, the fact that they give off the same aura as low effort papers is a problem for the authors.