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MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information

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Re: MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information

#51
post #22
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im pretty sure they use a vector storage database against their docs/resources so when you query they can just parse those sources and produce a free hallucination response to it. No need to make things up if you have the sources anyways.

“Hallucination free” or “Free hallucination”? The latter would be very different interpretation and some here would probably agree with that accusation

"Hallucination free"? No, no, no, it's "Hallucination? Free!!".

https://youtu.be/5yuL6PcgSgM

Re: MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information

#52
post #17

I don’t really understand viewpoints like these. The submitter knows the AI isn’t lying and the submitter is being purposefully obtuse in order to drive controversy.

We don’t need more garbage on our internet. MDN has been a high quality source of information forever now. This is a large step backwards. That’s the viewpoint.

Re: MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information

#53

Imagine putting an LLM anywhere health, safety, or regulation are involved. It would be engineering malpractice.

Don't worry: nobody would be incautious enough to hook a safety-critical system up to a general purpose computer, of all things.

Re: MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information

#54
post #25

I actually think this feature would be fine if implemented better. GPT-4 is perfectly capable of accurately explaining what a short code block does if you prompt it with relevant documentation… which MDN has in abundance, but isn’t using, for some reason. The mistakes seem to be (1) using GPT 3.5 instead because it’s cost effective, even though GPT 3.5 has severe issues with hallucination, and (2) not including conte…

I can't imagine any situation where it would be acceptable. I have personally wasted hundreds of hours over the course of my career due to incorrect documentation. There are millions of programmers in the world. Incorrect documentation has surely caused hundreds of millions of hours of wasted labor, or tens of billions of dollars of economic damage. That's just the damage of wasted development time, not the harm buggy software causes users.

Re: MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information

#55
post #44

This just looks like the poster child of "hell is made of good intentions". It may look seemingly harmless at first, even a good idea. But you'll seed doubt. As that will erode the value of the whole site. Which was its main asset.

Is this being driven by good intentions? It looks like they are jamming the latest AI hotness into a feature without taking much time at all to think it through or implement things well.

I’d bet heavily someone had “ship an AI product” in their APGs

Re: MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information

#56
post #25

I actually think this feature would be fine if implemented better. GPT-4 is perfectly capable of accurately explaining what a short code block does if you prompt it with relevant documentation… which MDN has in abundance, but isn’t using, for some reason. The mistakes seem to be (1) using GPT 3.5 instead because it’s cost effective, even though GPT 3.5 has severe issues with hallucination, and (2) not including conte…

For me, the most obvious problem is that it’s often mixing wrong information in. I found a couple of very simple examples where it accurately explained things but anything longer tended to have multiple incorrect points

On a deeper level, though, I don’t know that it’s actually useful. I haven’t found a single example where it added anything which wasn’t present in the authored text, and the explanations tend to be very pointless mechanical descriptions which miss the larger point of why you’d want to do things. On the popover API page, for example, it had a bunch of regurgitated comments before telling me that you’d need to write a bunch of JavaScript to actually toggle popover visibility when the whole point of that API is not needing to do that. That was also interesting with the incorrect claim that it was a non-standard attribute and you’d need to implement it using a JavaScript framework like Vue.js when you think about how much code someone might write if they relied on that explanation.

Re: MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information

#57

Hey ChatGPT, please generate a Firefox Corp-style apology for this snafu... Be sure to use some bullshit blah blah for our original aim of wanting to enhance user experience and listening to the users' feedback, and some more bullshit blah blah about doing better in the future.

Who owns MDN? I thought it was disbanded by Mozilla few years ago.

Re: MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information

#58
post #25

I actually think this feature would be fine if implemented better. GPT-4 is perfectly capable of accurately explaining what a short code block does if you prompt it with relevant documentation… which MDN has in abundance, but isn’t using, for some reason. The mistakes seem to be (1) using GPT 3.5 instead because it’s cost effective, even though GPT 3.5 has severe issues with hallucination, and (2) not including conte…

Does GPT-4 really never hallucinate?

This is the first time I've personally heard someone claiming anything like that, though I don't tend to do anything with LLMs (due to this bullshit factor).

Re: MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information

#60
post #57

Hey ChatGPT, please generate a Firefox Corp-style apology for this snafu... Be sure to use some bullshit blah blah for our original aim of wanting to enhance user experience and listening to the users' feedback, and some more bullshit blah blah about doing better in the future.

Who owns MDN? I thought it was disbanded by Mozilla few years ago.

The team was disbanded a few years ago, which led to the creation of Open Web Docs (I think it is charity, the website: https://openwebdocs.org/ ) where several former editors are still maintaining MDN content. It looks like Mozilla has rebuilt a team of developers though and is trying to extract money from MDN (ads, AI, …), though they don't contribute significantly to the content nowaday.
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