LLMs, and everyone who uses them to process information:
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
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ATTN: If you're coming into this thread to say, "The output of AI is bad because your prompts suck," I'm just proud that you managed to figure out how to use the internet at all. Good job, you!
remember remember, eternal september
(not that I much agree with the classist overtones of the original, but fuck me does it come to mind often)
You could use them to know what the text is about, and if it's worth your reading time. In this situation, it's fine if the AI makes shit up, as you aren't reading its output for the information itself anyway; and the distinction between summary and shortened version becomes moot.
However, here's the catch. If the text is long enough to warrant the question "should I spend my time reading this?", it should contain an introduction for that very purpose. In other words if the text is well-written you don't need this sort of "Gemini/ChatGPT, tell me what this text is about" on first place.
EDIT: I'm not addressing documents in this. My bad, I know. [In my defence I'm reading shit in a screen the size of an ant.]
ChatGPT gives you a bad summary full of hallucinations and, as a result, you choose not to read the text based on that summary.
(For clarity I'll re-emphasise that my top comment is the result of misreading the word "documents" out, so I'm speaking on general grounds about AI "summaries", not just about AI "summaries" of documents.)
The key here is that the LLM is likely to hallucinate the claims of the text being shortened, but not the topic. So provided that you care about the later but not the former, in order to decide if you're going to read the whole thing, it's good enough.
And that is useful in a few situations. For example, if you have a metaphorical pile of a hundred or so scientific papers, and you only need the ones about a specific topic (like "Indo-European urheimat" or "Argiope spiders" or "banana bonds").
That backtracks to the OP. The issue with using AI summaries for documents is that you typically know the topic at hand, and you want the content instead. That's bad because then the hallucinations won't be "harmless".
But the claims of the text are often why you read it in the first place! If you have a hundred scientific papers you're going to read the ones that make claims either supporting or contradicting your research.
You might as well just skim the titles and guess.
But the claims of the text are often why you read it in the first place!
By "not caring about the former" [claims], I mean in the LLM output, because you know that the LLM will fuck them up. But it'll still somewhat accurately represent the topic of the text, and you can use this to your advantage.
You might as well just skim the titles and guess.
Nirvana fallacy.
Unless it doesn't accurately represent the topic, which happens, and then a researcher chooses not to read the text based on the chatbot's summary.
Nirvana fallacy.
All these chatbots do is guess. I'm just saying a researcher might as well cut out the hallucinating middleman.
not reading the fucking sidebar and thinking this is high school debate club fallacy
not reading the fucking sidebar
Yeah, I get that this is a place to vent. And I get why to vent about this. LLMs and other A"I" systems (with quotation marks because this shite is not intelligent!) are being shoved down every bloody where, regardless of actual usefulness, safety, or user desire. Telling you to put glue on your pizza, to eat poisonous mushrooms, that "cherish" has five letters, that Latin had no [w], that the Chinese are inferior to Westerners.
While a crowd of irrationals tell you "it is intelligent, you can't prove otherwise! CHRUST IT YOU DIRTY SCEPTIC/INFIDEL/LUDDITE REEEE! LALALA I'M PRETENDING TO NOT SEE THE HALLUCINATION LALALA".
I also get the privacy nightmare that this shit is. And the whole deal behind "we're using your content as training data, and then selling the result back to you". Or that it's eating electricity like there's no tomorrow, in a planet where global warming is a present issue.
I get it. I get it all. That's why I'm here. And if you (or anyone else) think that I'm here for any other reason, by all means, check my profile - you'll find plenty pieces of criticism against those stupid corporate AI takes from vulture capital. (And plenty instances of me calling HN "Redditors LARPing as Hax0rz". )
However. Pretending that there's no use case ever for LLMs is the wrong way to go.
and thinking this is high school debate club fallacy
If calling it "nirvana fallacy" rubs you the wrong way, here's an alternative: "this argument is fucking stupid, in a very specific way: it pretends that either something is perfect or it's useless, with no middle ground."
The other user however does not deserve the unnecessary abrasiveness so I'll keep simply calling it "nirvana fallacy".
holy shit, imagine getting a second chance to not be a fucking debatelord and doubling down this hard
off you fuck
People just out here acting like a fundamentally, inextricably unreliable and unethical technology has a "use case"
smdh
No, it's just rambling. My bad.
I focused too much on using AI to summarise and ended not talking about it summarising documents, even if the text is about the later.
And... well, the later is such a dumb idea that I don't feel like telling people "the text is right, don't do that", it's obvious.
You'd think so, but guess what precise use case LLMs are being pushed hard for.
The problem is not the LLMs, but what people are trying to do with them.
They are currently spoons, but people are desperately wishing they were katanas.
They work really well for soup, but they can't cut steak. But they're being hyped as super ninja steak knives, and people are getting pissed when they can't cut steak.
If you give them watery, soupy tasks they can do successfully, they can lighten your workload, as long as you're aware of what they are and aren't good at.
What people want LLMs to be able to do, ie. "Steak" tasks:
-
write complex documents
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apply complex knowledge/rules to a situation
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Write complex code and create entire programs based on vague description
What LLMs can currently do ie. "Soup" tasks:
-
check this document and fix all spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors
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summarise this paragraph as dot points
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write a python program that sorts my photographs into folders based on the year they were taken
Half of Lemmy is hyping katanas, the other half is yelling "Why won't my spoon cut this steak?!! AI is so dumb!!!"
Update: wow, the pure vitriol pouring out of the replies is just stunning. Seems there are a lot of you out there who have, in one way or another, tied your ego very strongly to either the success or failure of AI.
Take a step back, friends, and go outside for a while.
"spoons and katanas" has got to be the most baby brained analogy. are you a child
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they don’t do any of that soup shit reliably either and reading the article might have told you that
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I'd offer congratulations on obfuscating a bad claim with a poor analogy, but you didn't even do that very well.
more of a Trabant analogy than a Corvette analogy
Food analogy
This level of discourse wouldn't fly on 4chan, how is it so popular with LLM fans?
needs to be a car analogy
- What people want LLMs to do, i.e. Corvette tasks
- What LLMs actually do, i.e. Trabant tasks
Ok? I don't have another human available to skim a shitload of documents for me to find answers I need and I don't have time to do ot myself. AI is my best option.
So long as you don't care about whether they're the right or relevant answers, you do you, I guess. Did you use AI to read the linked post too?
I didn't read the post at all because its premise is irrelevant to my situation. If I had another human to read documentation for me I would do that. I don't so the next best thing is AI. I have to double check its findings but it gets me 95% of the way there and saves hours of work. It's a useful tool.
I didn't read the post at all
rather refreshing to have someone come out and just say it. thank you for the chuckle
we really do need “my source is that I made it the fuck up” for people who aggressively don’t want to read any of the text they’re allegedly commenting on
This is hall of fame shit right here, someone should study the way you use the internet sir
absolutely superb posting, thank you
everyone, we have a new worst poster
Yep. Go ahead and ignore all the cases where it's getting answers correct and actually helping. We're all just hallucinating, it's in no way my lived experience. Your reality is the prime reality and we're the NPC's.
Go ahead and ignore all the cases where it’s getting answers correct
- Sir, half of the patients are dead!
- Ye sure, just ignore the half that survived then!
Only it's even worse because without redoing all the work yourself you can't even tell which ones are dead or alive.
And I wish only my good grades counted in school too.
sir has failed to achieve the reading comprehension level for this sub
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