Comment by Lerc
9 hours ago
Can you offer any evidence that it is any less accurate than a page hand crafted by a human?
I thought it provided an interesting tool for people to put things into perspective.
9 hours ago
Can you offer any evidence that it is any less accurate than a page hand crafted by a human?
I thought it provided an interesting tool for people to put things into perspective.
Well for one example, if you select a person born on the Italian peninsula in the 1400s and they die of bubonic plague, their year of death is not correlated to years when there were large bubonic plague outbreaks on the Italian peninsula.
This is not an error I would expect a human to make if they were interested enough in demography to make a website about it. For example, the wikipedia page on this topic[1] does a reasonable job of distinguishing that plagues did not occur every year and that they varied in lethality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_plague_pandemic#Italian...
And yet the bubonic plague did indeed exist and kill people between large outbreaks.
This is such a weird nitpick, it's clear the website deals in averages and assumptions. It's meant to be an interesting window into possible lives intermixed with historical happenings at, or around, those times.
I get that some people just hate AI, but of all things, this is a pretty fun & educational use of it.
I think our core disagreement is that I do not consider teaching falsehoods to be educational. My antipathy towards LLM outputs that haven't been fact-checked is mostly downstream of things like that.
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I don't think a hand-crafted app necessarily estimates things more accurately, but a sensible pre-LLM developer would probably not list so many dubious citations to trick people into believing it's accurate.