Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

restofworld.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 160 posts

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#101

Post by foxglacier »

turtletontine wrote: post #71
MisterTea wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are infinitely patient, infinitely available, and unbelievably knowledgeable, it really is miraculous. This is a strange way to talk about a computer program following its programming. I see no miracle here.

I feel like I’ve seen more and more people recently fall for this trick. No, LLMs are not “empathetic” or “patient”, and no, they do not have emotions. They’re incredibly huge piles of numbers following their incentives. Their behavior convincingly reproduces human behavior, and they express what looks like human emotions… because their training data is full of humans expressing emotions? Sure, sometimes it’s helpful…

Sounds like you aren't aware that a huge amount of human behaviors that look like empathy and patience are not real either. Do you really think all those kind-seeming call-center workers, waitresses, therapists, schoolteachers, etc. actually feel what they're showing? It's mostly an act. Look at how adults fake laughter for an obvious example of popular human emotion-faking.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#102

Post by donkeybeer »

turtletontine wrote: post #71
MisterTea wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are infinitely patient, infinitely available, and unbelievably knowledgeable, it really is miraculous. This is a strange way to talk about a computer program following its programming. I see no miracle here.

I feel like I’ve seen more and more people recently fall for this trick. No, LLMs are not “empathetic” or “patient”, and no, they do not have emotions. They’re incredibly huge piles of numbers following their incentives. Their behavior convincingly reproduces human behavior, and they express what looks like human emotions… because their training data is full of humans expressing emotions? Sure, sometimes it’s helpful…

What are humans made of? Is it anything more special than chemistry and numbers?

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#103

Post by Wilder7977 »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #36
reenorap wrote: post #18

I and many of my friends have used ChatGPT extremely effectively to diagnose medical issues. In fact, I would say that ChatGPT is better than most doctors because most doctors don't actually listen to you. ChatGPT took the time to ask me questions and based on my answers, narrowed down a particularly scary diagnosis and gave excellent instructions on how to get to a local hospital in a foreign country, what to ask fo…

I don't know if I could trust AI for big things, but I had nagging wrist pain for like a year, any time I extended my wrist (like while doing a pushup). It wasn't excruciating but it certainly wasn't pleasant, and it stopped me from doing certain activities (like pushups) I visited my GP, 2 wrist specialists, and physical therapist to help deal with it. I had multiple x rays and an MRI done. Steroid injection done. A…

Nothing personal, but without receipts I am going to take this story as made up propaganda. I simply can't believe that visiting 4 health professionals, giving context about using a computer all day, nobody diagnosed a very common issue nor suggested it as a possibility.

I simply can't imagine this happening based on my experience with healthcare in two (European) countries.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#104

Post by haritha-j »

It really hit me when she said the chatbot was more human, the doctor was like a machine. I heard the same complaint from my mother about her doctor, and about being afraid to ask a question because he might snap at her.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#105

Post by donkeybeer »

foxglacier wrote: post #101
turtletontine wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I’ve seen more and more people recently fall for this trick. No, LLMs are not “empathetic” or “patient”, and no, they do not have emotions. They’re incredibly huge piles of numbers following their incentives. Their behavior convincingly reproduces human behavior, and they express what looks like human emotions… because their training data is full of humans expressing emotions? Sure, sometimes it’s helpful…

Sounds like you aren't aware that a huge amount of human behaviors that look like empathy and patience are not real either. Do you really think all those kind-seeming call-center workers, waitresses, therapists, schoolteachers, etc. actually feel what they're showing? It's mostly an act. Look at how adults fake laughter for an obvious example of popular human emotion-faking.

Its more than that, this pile of numbers argument is really odd. I feel its hard to square this strange idea that piles of numbers are "lesser" than humans unless they are admitting belief in the supernatural .

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#106

Post by MikiRabbit »

turtletontine wrote: post #71
MisterTea wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are infinitely patient, infinitely available, and unbelievably knowledgeable, it really is miraculous. This is a strange way to talk about a computer program following its programming. I see no miracle here.

I feel like I’ve seen more and more people recently fall for this trick. No, LLMs are not “empathetic” or “patient”, and no, they do not have emotions. They’re incredibly huge piles of numbers following their incentives. Their behavior convincingly reproduces human behavior, and they express what looks like human emotions… because their training data is full of humans expressing emotions? Sure, sometimes it’s helpful…

It sounds like a regrettable situation: whether something is true or false, right or wrong, people don’t really care. What matters more to them is the immediate feeling. Today’s LLM can imitate human conversation so well that they’re hard to distinguish from a real person. This creates a dilemma for me: when humans and machines are hard to tell apart, how should I view the entity on the other side of the chat window? Is it a machine or a human? A human。

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#107

Post by emsign »

It's funny how he cites all these unreliable sources his mother used to consult but who's to say DeepSeek wasn't trained on them?

It's still insane to me how people can trust an LLM they didn't train themselves! You have no idea what vile and evil Dreck these models were trained with.

It's the click workers in third world countries who you don't recognize exist who could know if they were experts. But they aren't. A huge responsibility for these underpaid workers. They are the backbone of this hype, not GPUs. It's all built on shit. :)

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#108

Post by TeMPOraL »

thewebguyd wrote: post #56
HPsquared wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the computer is the bicycle of the mind, GenAI is a motor vehicle. Very powerful and transformative, but it's also possible to get into trouble.

A stark difference with that analogy is that with a bicycle, the human is still doing quite a bit of work themselves. The bicycle amplifies the human effort, whereas with a motor vehicle, the vehicle replaces the human effort entirely. No strong opinion on if that's good or bad long term, as humans have been outsourcing portions of their thinking for a really long time, but it's interesting to think about.

The other difference, arguably more important in practice, is that the computer was quickly turned from "bicycle of the mind" into a "TV of the mind". Rarely helps you get where you want, mostly just annoys or entertains you, while feeding you an endless stream of commercials and propaganda - and the one thing it does not give you, is control. There are prescribed paths to choose from, but you're not supposed to make your own - only sit down and stay along for the ride.

LLMs, at least for now, escape the near-total enshittification of computing. They're fully general-purpose, resist attempts at constraining them[0], and are good enough at acting like a human, they're able to defeat user-hostile UX and force interoperability on computer systems despite all attempts of the system owners at preventing it.

The last 2-3 years were a period where end-users (not just hardcore hackers) became profoundly empowered by technology. It won't last forever, but I hope we can get at least few more years of this, before business interests inevitably reassert their power over people once again.

--

[0] - Prompt injection "problem" was, especially early on, a feature from the perspective of end-users. See increasingly creative "jailbreak" prompts invented to escape ham-fisted attempts by vendors to censor models and prevent "inappropriate" conversations.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#109

Post by serious_angel »

What a nonsense, sorry...

Human is human already, regardless how they speak and what they do... There's always true sympathy and empathy to find in a human, regardless how busy, dark, erroneous etc. they are... Yet, it's the true alive soul inside in every person...

Medics are likely tired, doing their job every single day, yet they have empathy, and will always try to listen if you actually try... They know what PAIN, AGONY, DEATH, SORROW... fear means...

LLM/"AI" will always pretend to be a human, since it's "trained"/designed, to be so, and will always be limited and incomplete... Not to mention the initial dataset of numerous emphatic actual human has its limited memory inside, no one is responsible for.

What a hopeless sorrow is that awful trendy, advertised, mind-atrophying mess...

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#110

Post by tedggh »

kingstnap wrote: post #12

> she said she was aware that DeepSeek had given her contradictory advice. She understood that chatbots were trained on data from across the internet, she told me, and did not represent an absolute truth or superhuman authority With highly lucid people like the author's mom I'm not too worried about Dr. Deepseek. I'm actually incredibly bullish on the fact that AI models are, as the article describes, superhumanly em…

My experience with doctors in the US is that they often not only give you contradictory advice but just bad plain advice with complete lack of common sense. It feels like they are regurgitating medical school textbooks without a context window. I truly believe doctors, most specialists and definitely all general practitioners, are easily replaceable with the tech we have today. The only obstacle is regulations, insurance and not being able to sue a LLM. But it is not a technical issue anymore. Doctors would only be necessary to perform more complicated procedures such as surgery, and that’s until we can fully automate it with robots. Most of the complicated medical issues I have had, some related to the immune system, were solved by myself by seeing them as engineering problems, by debugging my own body. Meanwhile doctors seeing me had no clue. And this was before having the tools we have today. It’s like doctors often cannot think beyond the box and focus only in treating symptoms. My sister is a doctor by the way and she suffers from the same one-size-fits-all approach to medicine.
Post reply on HN