When we had to have a frank discussion about whether to fail someone who obviously used an LLM for parts their dissertation.
well?
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
61–70 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#62Non-technical people I know are starting to take AI responses to their questions as 100% true fact.
They did the same with Google search results that were just SEO garbage content, too.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#63I could go on and on, but Claude recently decompiled the firmware of my camper van, documented all the CAN interfaces, then programmed an ESP32 module to talk to the van’s integrated systems (power, HVAC, lighting, tanks). That sort of embedded systems integration is completely out of my wheelhouse. I honestly don’t understand AI naysayers. I use Claude every day both professionally as a Solution Architect and person…
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Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#64I've had a few.
The biggest technical one was when we were making an all day wearable AI assistant thing. It basically had really precise office location (think cm level accurate) a shitty VLM to describe what the wide angle lens was looking at, Speech to text, OCR and a gaze recorder that decribed what you were looking at.
This was all streamed to sqlite. The thing that was really "oh shit" what the thing that made the whole system usable: a 4 paragraph prompt that turned natural language into SQL and reported back to the (non technical user) what they wanted to know.
The most recent one is being caught out by Genai video of a gymnast. I worked in VFX so I am normally able to spot dodgy shit, but this one was close to being real, scarily real.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#65When I realized that an LLM can process all the traffic in Slack that overwhelms me daily and give me a manageable digest. How long until they intermediate most of our social interactions? Sooner than we can possibly adapt, I think.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#66Ever since the first Davinci model of GPT-3 ive literally been using LLMs daily. It was an indispensable tool for me from the very beginning and despite 10,000+ hours of usage and research, I still feel like ive barely cracked the surface of whats possible with current genai tech.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#67When I realized that an LLM can process all the traffic in Slack that overwhelms me daily and give me a manageable digest. How long until they intermediate most of our social interactions? Sooner than we can possibly adapt, I think.
If you social interactions can be mediated by a chatbot I implore you to find better social interaction
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#68My most recent one: Taking a bricked ipad and plugging it into my linux laptop, then telling deepseek to fix it. A couple of hours and twenty sudo passwords later it was working again.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#69When none of the models, STOA or not, could answer any genuinely interesting question. All models could regurgitate was has been expressed before but nothing actually new was there, until explicitly asked for, and even then it required filtering through potentially so much noise it was practically not interesting anymore as it required all the knowledge to validate or invalidate the claims. That's when, few years ago…
Related but distinct, few years later I asked an acquaintance to ask a question to a model. I didn't want to bias the test so I ask them to ask whatever they wanted. They asked "What time is it in Sri Lanka?" which I thought was a funny question. I predicted it wouldn't work because it was asked to an offline model so I thought it wouldn't manage to get current data. Still, I didn't interfere and we watch the answer…
"I couldn't remember the order of the words in 'state of the art' so I just spray and pray across the keyboard like usual. I can't tell the difference because I'm just a pattern matching bot"
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#70I tried to get it to generate code to program one of my BitGrid simulators, and it kept producing code that failed, over and over. It was then that I figured out that it can only do CRUD apps and the like, things it's seen over and over in its training data. It's useless for most of what I want to code.
GPT literally generates perfect code for me in languages that do not exist anywhere in its training set, so I’m not sure how you’ve achieved this level of failure.