this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
959 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
72729 readers
1707 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah, they’re statistical word generators. There’s no intelligence. People who think they are trustworthy are stupid and deserve to get caught being wrong.
Ok what about tech journalists who produced articles with those misunderstandings. Surely they know better yet still produce articles like this. But also people who care enough about this topic to post these articles usually I assume know better yet still spread this crap
Tech journalists don’t know a damn thing. They’re people that liked computers and could also bullshit an essay in college. That doesn’t make them an expert on anything.
... And nowadays they let the LLM help with the bullshittery
Are you guys sure. The media seems to be where a lot of LLM hate originates.
that is such a ridiculous idea. Just because you see hate for it in the media doesn't mean it originated there. I'll have you know that i have embarrassed myself by screaming at robot phone receptionists for years now. stupid fuckers pretending to be people but not knowing shit. I was born ready to hate LLMs and I'm not gonna have you claim that CNN made me do it.
Search AI in Lemmy and check out every article on it. It definitely is media spreading all the hate. And like this article is often some money yellow journalism
all that proves is that lemmy users post those articles. you're skirting around psychotic territory here, seeing patterns where there are none, reading between the lines to find the cover-up that you are already certain is there, with nothing to convince you otherwise.
if you want to be objective and rigorous about it, you'd have to start with looking at all media publications and comparing their relative bias.
then you'd have to consider their reasons for bias, because it could just be that things actually suck. (in other words, if only 90% of media reports that something sucks when 99% of humanity agrees it sucks, maybe that 90% is actually too low, not too high)
this is all way more complicated than media brainwashing.
I think it's lemmy users. I see a lot more LLM skepticism here than in the news feeds.
In my experience, LLMs are like the laziest, shittiest know-nothing bozo forced to complete a task with zero attention to detail and zero care about whether it's crap, just doing enough to sound convincing.
Wdym, I have seen researchers using it to aid their research significantly. You just need to verify some stuff it says.
Verify every single bloody line of output. Top three to five are good, then it starts guessing the rest based on the pattern so far. If I wanted to make shit up randomly, I would do it myself.
People who trust LLMs to tell them things that are right rather than things that sound right have fundamentally misunderstood what an LLM is and how it works.
It's not that bad, the output isn't random. Time to time, it can produce novel stuffs like new equations for engineering. Also, verification does not take that much effort. At least according to my colleagues, it is great. Also works well for coding well-known stuffs, as well!
It's not completely random, but I'm telling you it fucked up, it fucked up badly, time after time, and I had to check every single thing manually. It's correctness run never lasted beyond a handful. If you build something using some equation it invented you're insane and should quit engineering before you hurt someone.
😆 I can't believe how absolutely silly a lot of you sound with this.
LLM is a tool. It's output is dependent on the input. If that's the quality of answer you're getting, then it's a user error. I guarantee you that LLM answers for many problems are definitely adequate.
It's like if a carpenter said the cabinets turned out shit because his hammer only produces crap.
Also another person commented that seen the pattern you also see means we're psychotic.
All I'm trying to suggest is Lemmy is getting seriously manipulated by the media attitude towards LLMs and these comments I feel really highlight that.
No, I know the data I gave it and I know how hard I tried to get it to use it truthfully.
You have an irrational and wildly inaccurate belief in the infallibility of LLMs.
You're also denying the evidence of my own experience. What on earth made you think I would believe you over what I saw with my own eyes?
Why are you giving it data. It's a chat and language tool. It's not data based. You need something trained to work for that specific use. I think Wolfram Alpha has better tools for that.
I wouldn't trust it to calculate how many patio stones I need to build a project. But I trust it to tell me where a good source is on a topic or if a quote was said by who ever or if I need to remember something but I only have vague pieces like old timey historical witch burning related factoid about villagers who pulled people through a hole in the church wall or what was a the princess who was skeptic and sent her scientist to villages to try to calm superstitious panic .
Other uses are like digging around my computer and seeing what processes do what. How concepts work regarding the think I'm currently learning. So many excellent users. But I fucking wouldn't trust it to do any kind of calculation.
Because there's a button for that.
This thing that you said... It's false.
There's a sleep button on my laptop. Doesn't mean I would use it.
I'm just trying to say you're saying the feature that everyone kind of knows doesn't work. Chatgpt is not trained to do calculations well.
I just like technology and I think and fully believe the left hatred of it is not logical. I believe it stems from a lot of media be and headlines. Why there's this push From media is a question I would like to know more. But overall, I see a lot of the same makers of bullshit yellow journalism for this stuff on the left as I do for similar bullshit on the right wing spaces towards other things.
Again with dismissing the evidence of my own eyes!
I wasn't asking it to do calculations, I was asking it to put the data into a super formulaic sentence. It was good at the first couple of rows then it would get stuck in a rut and start lying. It was crap. A seven year old would have done it far better, and if I'd told a seven year old that they had made a couple of mistakes and to check it carefully, they would have done.
Again, I didn't read it in a fucking article, I read it on my fucking computer screen, so if you'd stop fucking telling me I'm stupid for using it the way it fucking told me I could use it, or that I'm stupid for believing what the media tell me about LLMs, when all I'm doing is telling you my own experience, you'd sound a lot less like a desperate troll or someone who is completely unable to assimilate new information that differs from your dogma.
What does "I give it data to put in a formulaic sentence." mean here
Why not just share the details. I often find a lot of people saying it's doing crazy things and never like to share the details. It's very similar to discussing things with Trump supporters who do the same shit when pressed on details about stuff they say occurs. Like the same "you're a troll for asking for evidence of my claim" that trumpets do. It's wild how similar it is.
And yes asking to do things like iterate over rows isn't how it works. It's getting better but that's not what it's primarily used for. It could be but isn't. It only catches so many tokens. It's getting better and has some persistence but it's nowhere near what its strength is.
I would be in breach of contract to tell you the details. How about you just stop trying to blame me for the clear and obvious lies that the LLM churned out and start believing that LLMs ARE are strikingly fallible, because, buddy, you have your head so far in the sand on this issue it's weird.
The solution to the problem was to realise that an LLM cannot be trusted for accuracy even if the first few results are completely accurate, the bullshit well creep in. Don't trust the LLM. Check every fucking thing.
In the end I wrote a quick script that broke the input up on tab characters and wrote the sentence. That's how formulaic it was. I regretted deeply trying to get an LLM to use data.
The frustrating thing is that it is clearly capable of doing the task some of the time, but drifting off into FANTASY is its strong suit, and it doesn't matter how firmly or how often you ask it to be accurate or use the input carefully. It's going to lie to you before long. It's an LLM. Bullshitting is what it does. Get it to do ONE THING only, then check the fuck out of its answer. Don't trust it to tell you the truth any more than you would trust Donald J Trump to.
This is crazy. I've literally been saying they are fallible. You're saying your professional fed and LLM some type of dataset. So I can't really say what it was you're trying to accomplish but I'm just arguing that trying to have it process data is not what they're trained to do. LLM are incredible tools and I'm tired of trying to act like they're not because people keep using them for things they're not built to do. It's not a fire and forget thing. It does need to be supervised and verified. It's not exactly an answer machine. But it's so good at parsing text and documents, summarizing, formatting and acting like a search engine that you can communicate with rather than trying to grok some arcane sentence. Its power is in language applications.
It is so much fun to just play around with and figure out where it can help. I'm constantly doing things on my computer it's great for instructions. Especially if I get a problem that's kind of unique and needs a big of discussion to solve.
No. Not when it matters. It makes stuff up. The less you carefully check every single fucking thing it says, the more likely you are to believe some lies it subtly slipped in as it went along. If truth doesn't matter, go ahead and use LLMs.
If you just want some ideas that you're going to sift through, independently verify and check for yourself with extreme skepticism as if Donald Trump were telling you how to achieve world peace, great, you're using LLMs effectively.
But if you're trusting it, you're doing it very, very wrong and you're going to get humiliated because other people are going to catch you out in repeating an LLM's bullshit.
If it's so bad as if you say, could you give an example of a prompt where it'll tell you incorrect information.
It's like you didn't listen to anything I ever said, or you discounted everything I said as fiction, but everything your dear LLM said is gospel truth in your eyes. It's utterly irrational. You have to be trolling me now.
Should be easy if it's that bad though
I already told you my experience of the crapness of LLMs and even explained why I can't share the prompt etc. You clearly weren't listening or are incapable of taking in information.
There's also all the testing done by the people talked about in the article we're discussing which you're also irrationally dismissing.
You have extreme confirmation bias.
Everything you hear that disagrees with your absurd faith in the accuracy of the extreme blagging of LLMs gets dismissed for any excuse you can come up with.
You're projecting here. I'm asking you to give an example of any prompt. You're saying it's so bad that it needs to be babysat because it's errors. I'll only asking for your to give an example and you're saying that's confirmation bias and acting like I'm being religiously ignorant
This is you
https://youtu.be/mkcKQmr7kRc
Whatever gets ad views
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
Whoa that's like how many colors there are
AI cant even understand it's own brain to write about it
Neither can we...
and? we can understand 256 where AI can't, that's the point.
The 256 thing was written by a person. AI doesn't have exclusive rights to being dumb, plenty of dumb people around.
you're right, the dumb of AI is completely comparable to the dumb of human, there's no difference worth talking about, sorry i even spoke the fuck up
No worries.
I liked when the Chicago Sun-Times put out a summer reading list and only a third of the books on it were real. Each book had a summary of the plot next to it too. They later apologized for it.
Check out Ed Zitron's angry reporting on Tech journalists fawning over this garbage and reporting on it uncritically. He has a newsletter and a podcast.
Emotion > Facts. Most people have been trained to blindly accept things and cheer on what fits with their agenda. Like technbro's exaggerating LLMs, or people like you misrepresenting LLMs as mere statistical word generators without intelligence. That's like saying a computer is just wires and switches, or missing the forest for the trees. Both is equally false.
Yet if it fits with the emotional needs or with dogma, then other will agree. It's a convenient and comforting "A vs B" worldview we've been trained to accept. And so the satisfying notion and misinformation keeps spreading.
LLMs tell us more about human intelligence and the human slop we've been generating. It tells us that most people are not that much more than statistical word generators.
You've bought-in to the hype. I won't try to argue with you because you aren't cognizent of reality.
You're projecting. Every accusation is a confession.
Truth is bitter, and I hate it.