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AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

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Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#61

Post by tayo42 »

jayd16 wrote: post #13
reticulates wrote: post #9

Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage. A large number of people seem to think that when someone asks a question, what they really want is not someone with direct knowledge, but instead someone to relay the question to ChatGPT and post the result as if it is their own hard earned knowledge and insight. I have no idea about the quality of this research but in the real world (well, real…

We had to officially set the culture in the work slack. If you're just piping through raw AI response without any input of your own, you're being rude. It goes a long way.

Like you just have a pinned message or something?

How did people respond to that?

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#62

Post by imoverclocked »

I saw a post that some teachers are now asking students to ask ChatGPT to do their assignments… and then critique it where it is wrong.

I feel like this might be an interesting method for places where the default response tends to be someone submitting copy-pasta: just give the ai-response and then have community discussion around what it missed.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#63

Post by doubled112 »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #43
reticulates wrote: post #9

Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage. A large number of people seem to think that when someone asks a question, what they really want is not someone with direct knowledge, but instead someone to relay the question to ChatGPT and post the result as if it is their own hard earned knowledge and insight. I have no idea about the quality of this research but in the real world (well, real…

The advice subreddits were absolutely horrible before AI. The entire 2016-2024 period was utter madness there, likely as a result of globalization. As AI gets smarter, it may make the comments better, sadly!

Maybe, but isn't it likely the models are being trained on those same subreddits?

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#64

Post by JoshTriplett »

ls-a wrote: post #60
reticulates wrote: post #9

Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage. A large number of people seem to think that when someone asks a question, what they really want is not someone with direct knowledge, but instead someone to relay the question to ChatGPT and post the result as if it is their own hard earned knowledge and insight. I have no idea about the quality of this research but in the real world (well, real…

[flagged]

The pro AI wave needs to stop. It's obnoxious. Stop pushing it on people. If people want it, they'll seek it out. And, unfortunately, they'll then inflict it on the people around them.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#65

Post by Aurornis »

reticulates wrote: post #9

Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage. A large number of people seem to think that when someone asks a question, what they really want is not someone with direct knowledge, but instead someone to relay the question to ChatGPT and post the result as if it is their own hard earned knowledge and insight. I have no idea about the quality of this research but in the real world (well, real…

> Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage.

Most of the advice and information subreddits I previously visited collapsed into bad posting even before AI.

The few I still follow are oddly fine.

The key was always having an active moderator who cared and had unbelievable amounts of time to moderate. Once the subreddit gets past a critical mass of junk-posting users, the good users leave and there's no coming back.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#66

Post by roncesvalles »

ls-a wrote: post #60
reticulates wrote: post #9

Advice and information subreddits have gone to shit because of AI usage. A large number of people seem to think that when someone asks a question, what they really want is not someone with direct knowledge, but instead someone to relay the question to ChatGPT and post the result as if it is their own hard earned knowledge and insight. I have no idea about the quality of this research but in the real world (well, real…

[flagged]

Your comment has nothing to do with the comment you replied to. I almost suspect it's satire.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#68

Post by GuB-42 »

wisty wrote: post #7

AI pessimist view. Even if AI gets smarter it will still be agreeable, and people will use it to more confidently reinforce thier stupider ideas, especially in areas where they lack the knowledge to know if they are right. Even if this can be solved, technically, people won't want to use the model that says they are wrong, so they will choose the glib lies that reinforce their beliefs. Freedown of speech forces peopl…

More recent AI tends to be less agreeable, sycophancy is widely recognized as a problem and AI companies are working to fix it. And sure enough, some people don't like it, as shown when OpenAI shut down GPT-4o.

But for the people who do actual work with AI, who are the people who pay a lot of money for it, they prefer to be called wrong when they are, because it is better to be called wrong by an AI than being wrong in front of a customer.

It is not an easy problem to fix, because as much as we want an AI to give us the right answer rather than just being agreeable, we still need them to follow orders, and AI that doesn't would be quite useless. So there is a balance to be found. Smarter models tend to do better because they know what is right, compared to smaller models that don't and then assume you are right and hallucinate from there.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#69

Post by rsanek »

Another case of study design not really supporting the headline. According to the paper, the comparison here was "no advice" or "AI advice": there was no "placebo" where you have advice / references from non-AI materials. Think e.g. Google's instant answer box, pre-AI. It's hard to say without the comparison, but I have to imagine displaying that would have similar effects.

There's plenty of other issues with the study, one of the primary ones being that they chose a relatively 'dumb' AI (Step 3.5 Flash), but also, specifically hand-selected wrong answers. People that are used to using competent AIs that are mostly correct would be operating off of experience that suggests they should trust AI. In this case, by design, they shouldn't have, but it's hard to fault the user for that.

Re: AI advice made people less accurate but more confident – sudy

#70

Post by lll-o-lll »

mmooss wrote: post #38
lll-o-lll wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not a solution. Humans are wired to anthropomorphise; we do it with sticks and rocks. How much more so with LLMs. We’ve invented a technology that hijacks that part of humanity more effectively than anything ever. Asking people to “not be so stupid” is not going to help.

Both claims seem to obviously contradict reality, imho: > Humans are wired to anthropomorphise; we do it with sticks and rocks. I do not see people anthropomorphize their TVs, books, paintings, cars, houses, rocks, sticks, ... I'm not sure what you're talking about here. I haven't seen someone call a rock or stick by a pronoun, for example. I've seen people fancifully do it, but it's exaggeration for a cute effect, a…

I did not say that humans anthropomorphise every rock or stick. The point is that we are hard-wired for this possibility. Perhaps something more relatable? A cat? We ascribe all sorts of emotions to instinctive feline behaviours. It doesn’t matter with cats.

> In a way, it's more worship of technology to say humans are hopelessly, powerlessly dumb, and technology inevitably rules them.

You as an individual have some autonomy against the machines. Some. (Scroll facebook an hour a day and show me your resilience to engagement engineering). But the point of this is what happens at population scale.

To ignore our biology is as stupid as suggesting we must be ruled by it.

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