It depends on how you look at it. The creative process isn't just a piece of code. It usually involves trying, tweaking, testing, and tuning before an optimal solution is reached. In both the real world and with software development, achieving a perfect result in a single shot is more the exception than the rule.
Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
91–100 of 119 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#92So, if you dealt with a person who knew all the vocabulary related to a field, and could make well-constructed sentences about that field, and sounded confident, it would almost always mean they had spent a lot of time studying that field. That tends to mean that, although they may occasionally make a mistake, they will usually be correct. People apply the same intuition to LLMs, and because it's not a person (and it…
Even with a human speaker, that's not a totally safe assumption, and a certain type of fraudster relies heavily on people making this type of assumption (the likes of L Ron Hubbard in particular liked to use the language of expertise for various fields in a nonsensical way, and this is extremely convincing to a certain sort of person). But LLMs might almost have been designed to exploit this particular cognitive bias; there's really significant danger here.
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#93LLMs would be better nomenclature than AI in this context. LLMs are not factual databases. They are not trained to retrieve or produce factual statements. LLMs give you the most likely word after some prior words. They are incredibly accurate at estimating the probabilities of the next word. It is a weird accident that you can use auto-regressive next word prediction to make a chat bot. It's even weirder that you can…
> LLM chatbots ... were not designed to be "factually correct" they were designed to predict words.
For this question, what LLMs were designed for is I think less relevent than what they are advertised for, e.g.
"Get answers. Find inspiration. Be more productive. Free to use. Easy to try. Just ask and ChatGPT can help with writing, learning, brainstorming, and more." https://openai.com/chatgpt/
No mention of predicting words.
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#94Your point is valid if you believe LLM/Generative AI is deterministic; it is not. It is inference-based, and thus it provides different answers even given the same input at times. The question then becomes, "How wrong can it be and still be useful?" This depends on the use case. It is much harder for applications that require high deterministic output but less important for those that do not. So yes, it does provide…
> Your point is valid if you believe LLM/Generative AI is deterministic; it is not. It is inference-based, and thus it provides different answers even given the same input at times.
Inference is no excuse for inconsistency. Inference can be deterministic and so deliver consistency.
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#95Think of it as a system returning complex results after a search. Think of it as a synthetic search result. Think of it as a result where you still have to evaluate the source for reliability. Think of it as a junior engineer making mistakes. Think of it as a reason why you will have job security for complex tasks because the easy tasks can be done by dumber project managers. Think of it like you are now a senior eng…
> Think of it as a junior engineer making mistakes.
A junior engineer who repeats the same mistakes even after correction, never learns ... and soon gets the sack.
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#96If people are paying for their product, why should they care? As for why people are paying for a product that returns incorrect results, could be any number of reasons: - People buy into the hype/marketing and actually think AI-thing is going to replace some part of their workflow - People want to experiment and see how well it does at replacing part of their workflow - Whatever the AI-thing does for a customer is no…
I am interested to know why you omitted
- People don't know that much of the output is incorrect
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#97So, if you dealt with a person who knew all the vocabulary related to a field, and could make well-constructed sentences about that field, and sounded confident, it would almost always mean they had spent a lot of time studying that field. That tends to mean that, although they may occasionally make a mistake, they will usually be correct. People apply the same intuition to LLMs, and because it's not a person (and it…
I find that "intelligence" was a shaky concept to begin with, but LLMs have completely thrown the idea in the trash. When someone says "LLMs are not intelligent", I treat that as a bit of a signal that I shouldn't pay much attention to their other points, because if you haven't realized that you don't have a good definition for intelligence, what else haven't you realized?
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#98"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his NVIDIA shares depend upon his not understanding it"
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#99Think of it as a system returning complex results after a search. Think of it as a synthetic search result. Think of it as a result where you still have to evaluate the source for reliability. Think of it as a junior engineer making mistakes. Think of it as a reason why you will have job security for complex tasks because the easy tasks can be done by dumber project managers. Think of it like you are now a senior eng…
> Think of it as a junior engineer making mistakes. A junior engineer who repeats the same mistakes even after correction, never learns ... and soon gets the sack.
looks like you have little experience with junior engineers. now try experiencing junior engineers who will never grow to senior engineering levels.
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#100Personally, I and people I've spoken with use LLMs less and less because of how often they're wrong. The other day I asked ChatGPT about a specific built-in method in Java and it told me that it couldn't do one specific thing. I was already using it in that context so I pushed back and it said "Oh yeah you're right, sorry" I feel like I can't trust anything it says. Mostly I use it to parse things I don't understand…
> I was already using it in that context so I pushed back and it said "Oh yeah you're right, sorry" Same thing happened to me. I asked for all the Ukrainian noun cases, it listed and described six. I responded that there are seven. "Oh, right." It then named and described the seventh. That's no better than me taking an exam, so why should I rely on it, or use it at all?
If you find it absolutely necessary to only work with coworkers who are incapable of making mistakes, I assume that you probably work alone?