archomrade [he/him] @ archomrade @midwest.social

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15

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1,615

Joined

2 yr. ago

There will always be a class of programmers/people that choose not to interrogate or seek to understand information that is conveyed to them - that doesn't negate the value provided by tools like Stack Overflow or chatGPT, and I think OP was expressing that value.

Why do we expect a higher degree of trustworthiness from a novel LLM than we de from any given source or forum comment on the internet?

At what point do we stop hand-wringing over llms failing to meet some perceived level of accuracy and hold the people using it responsible for verifying the response themselves?

Theres a giant disclaimer on every one of these models that responses may contain errors or hallucinations, at this point I think it's fair to blame the user for ignoring those warnings and not the models for not meeting some arbitrary standard.

reading comprehension

Lmao, there should also be an automod rule for this phrase, too.

There’s a huge difference between a coworker saying [...]

Lol, you're still talking about it like it's a person that can be reasoned with bud. It's just a piece of software. If it doesn't give you the response you want you can try using a different prompt, just like if google doesn't find what you're looking for you can change your search terms.

If people are gullible enough to take its responses as given (or scold it for not being capable of rational thought lmao) then that's their problem - just like how people can take the first search result from google without scrutiny if they want to, too. There's nothing especially problematic about the existence of an AI chatbot that hasn't been addressed with the advent of every other information technology.

Except each of those drips are subject to the same system that preferences individualized transport

This is still a perfect example, because while you're nit-picking the personal habits of individuals who are a fraction of a fraction of the total contributors to GPT model usage, huge multi-billion dollar entities are implementing it into things that have no business using it and are representative for 90% of llm queries.

Similar for castigating people for owning ICE vehicles, who are not only uniquely pressued into their use but are also less than 10% of GHG emissions in the first place.

Stop wasting your time attacking individuals using the tech for help in their daily tasks, they aren't the problem.

… I wasn’t trying to trick it.

I was trying to use it.

Err, I'd describe your anecdote more as an attempt to reason with it...? If you were using google to search for an answer to something and it came up with the wrong thing, you wouldn't then complain back to it about it being wrong, you'd just try again with different terms or move on to something else. If 'using' it for you is scolding it as if it's an incompetent coworker, then maybe the problem isn't the tool but how you're trying to use it.

I wasn’t aware the purpose of this joke meme thread was to act as a policy workshop to determine an actionable media campaign

Lmao, it certainly isn't. Then again, had you been responding with any discernible humor of your own I might not have had reason to take your comment seriously.

And yes, I very intentionally used the phrase ‘understand how computers actually work’ to infantilize and demean corporate executives.

Except your original comment wasn't directed at corporate executives, it appears to be more of a personal review of the tool itself. Unless your boss was the one asking you to use Gemini? Either way, that phrase is used so much more often as self-aggrandizement and condescension that it's hard to see it as anything else, especially when it follows an anecdote of that person trying to reason with a piece of software lmao.

Then why are we talking about someone getting it to spew inaccuracies in order to prove a point, rather than the decision of marketing execs to proliferate its use for a million pointless implementations nobody wants at the expense of far higher energy usage?

Most people already know and understand that it's bad at most of what execs are trying to push it as, it's not a public-perception issue. We should be talking about how energy-expensive it is, and curbing its use on tasks where it isn't anything more than an annoying gimmick. At this point, it's not that people don't understand its limitations, it's that they don't understand how much energy it's costing and how it's being shoved into everything we use without our noticing.

Somebody hopping onto openAI or Gemini to get help with a specific topic or task isn't the problem. Why are we trading personal anecdotes about sporadic personal usage when the problem is systemic, not individualized?

people who actually understand how computers work

Bit idea for moderators: there should be a site or community-wide auto-mod rule that replaces this phrase with 'eat all their vegitables' or something that is equally un-serious and infantilizing as 'understand how computers work'.

The energy expenditure for GPT models is basically a per-token calculation. Having it generate a list of 3-4 token responses would barely be a blip compared to having it read and respond entire articles.

There might even be a case for certain tasks with a GPT model being more energy efficient than making multiple google searches for the same. Especially considering all the backend activity google tacks on for tracking users and serving ads, complaining about someone using a GPT model for something like generating a list of words is a little like a climate activist yelling at someone for taking their car to the grocery store while standing across the street from a coal-burning power plant.

The usefulness of Stack Overflow or a GPT model completely depends on who is using it and how.

It also depends on who or what is answering the question, and I can't tell you how many times someone new to SO has been scolded or castigated for needing/wanting help understanding something another user thinks is simple. For all of the faults of GPT models, at least they aren't outright abusive to novices trying to learn something new for themselves.

Idk why we have to keep re-hashing this debate about whether AI is a trustworthy source or summarizer of information when it's clear that it isn't - at least not often enough to justify this level of attention.

It's not as valuable as the marketing suggests, but it does have some applications where it may be helpful, especially if given a conscious effort to direct it well. It's better understood as a mild curiosity and a proof of concept for transformer-based machine learning that might eventually lead to something more profound down the road but certainly not as it exists now.

What is really un-compelling, though, is the constant stream of anecdotes about how easy it is to fool into errors. It's like listening to an adult brag about tricking a kid into thinking chocolate milk comes from brown cows. It makes it seem like there's some marketing battle being fought over public perception of its value as a product that's completely detached from how anyone actually uses or understands it as a novel piece of software.

I'm impressed that you can handle that many jellyfin users

The range of sofistication in this thread is actually kind of breathtaking

I was so close to asking what the hell that thing was

maybe it's because i've been watching too much of the office lately but I expected you to end this comment with:

But those reasons aren't nefarious

I can't wait for everyone to make a big deal about COVID again now that Trump is heading back to the WH.

Never-mind that it's been raging basically un-restricted for the last 4 years while the CDC has been relaxing its mitigation guidance - now that Trump and his anti-vax buddies are back in office it's suddenly going to be a crisis again.

Say whatever you want about COVID becoming endemic and not important enough to act against, Biden took the very first opportunity to cut back on COVID labor protections as soon as it was clear that increasing vaccination rates wasn't going to solve the rapid spread. Things like paid sick leave, the eviction moratorium and rent freezes, Federally funded COBRA and free treatment initiatives were all groundbreaking social programs that should have been made into permanent fixtures and would have been a positive legacy for his administration, but they didn't even try to stretch those programs on the basis that COVID was still a clear and present danger.

Big "mission accomplished" vibes.

Downloaders can be prosecuted.

They wouldn't go after the users, just the domains and the host servers. Similar to shutting down TPB or other tracker site, they'd go after the site host. True enough, there wouldn't necessarily be risk to users of those sites, but if they escalated things enough (like if an authoritarian got elected and was so motivated....) they could start taking more severe punitive action. Who knows, they could amend the regulation to go after the users if they wanted - it's a dangerous precedent either way. Especially when the intent is to 'protect children', there's no limit to how far they might take it in the future.

Blocked servers are inaccessible to adults, too, which raises freedom of information issues.

I'm not familiar with Australian law but I don't think this really applies. Most countries with internet censorship laws don't have any guaranteed right to uncensored information. At least in the US, they don't have 'censorship' per se, but they do sometimes 'block' an offending site by seizing domains/servers/equipment, and they can force search engines de-list them if the offense is severe enough. If the server is beyond their reach, they can prosecute or sanction the person hosting the site to pressure them into compliance. I can imagine a social media site who refuses to age verify and that hosts pornographic content (cough cough lemmy cough cough) be pursued like a CSAM site.

Large scale piracy is illegal pretty much everywhere, meaning that the industry can go after the operators and get the servers offline. Not so here.

That doesn't mean they can't throw their weight around and bully self-hosters/small-time hobbyists and scare them into compliance. Any western country enacting a law like this could pressure their western trade partners to comply with enforcement efforts. And anyway it isn't necessarily about the practicality of enforcing the law, so much as giving prosecutors a long leash to make a lot of noise and scare small-time hobbyists out of hosting non compliant sites. Most people can't afford the headache, even if it isn't enforceable where they live.

It gets banned/blocked, or sued for noncompliance for allowing Australian users without age verification. They'll play whack a mole for decades, just like they have been for P2P file sharing.

Like a lot of post-911 legislation, it's anti-privacy surveillance disguised as a way to 'protect the children'. It's absolute shit and we should absolutely be taking measures to anonymize our open source social media platforms further.

There's no editorial process, anyone can post anything (within the TOS).

A lot of people use it for personal vlogs and such. It might be easier to ask how it's meaningfully different from something like tiktok that makes it not social media.

Yea, no disagreement. I more am curious if the federated nature is what helps mitigate that risk, or if there is some other systemic distinction that has helped.

I also just don't know what the others were like long-term - did they peeter out? Would I realize it if lemmy was in the same decline?

Yes, famously anti-capitalist Liberalism....