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Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

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Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, your parents spoke out of ignorance and resistance towards any sort of change, I'm speaking from years of experience of both trying to use the technology productively, as well as spending a significant portion of my life in the digital world that has been impacted by it. I remember being mesmerized by GPT-3 before ChatGPT was even a thing. The only thing that has been revolutionized over the past few years is the…

Personally, I have three use cases for AI: 1. Image upscaling. I am decorating my house and AI allowed me to get huge prints from tiny shitty pictures. It's not perfect, but it works. 2. Conversational partner. It's a different question whether it's a good or a bad thing, but I can spend hours talking to Claude about things in general. He's expensive though. 3. Learning basics of something. I'm trying to install LED…

> [...] My point is, you're wrong.

Image upscaling is not an LLM technology, using current-gen LLMs as conversational partners is highly undesirable for many reasons, and learning the basics of things IS indeed useful, but it doesn't even begin to offset the productivity losses that LLMs have caused by decimating what was left of the signal-to-noise ratio on the internet.

You haven't even tried to address my chief concern about QUALITY of information at all. I'm perfectly aware that you can ask ChatGPT to do anything, you can ask it to plan your wedding, you can ask it do decorate your house, you can ask if two medications are safe to consume together, you can ask it for relationship advice, you can ask it if your dating profile looks appealing, you can ask it to help diagnose you with a medical conditions, you can ask it to analyze a spreadsheet.

It's going to come back with an answer for all of those, but if you're someone who cares about correctness, quality, and anything that's actually real, you'll have a sinking feeling in your gut doubting the answer you received. Does it actually understand anything about human relationships, or is it giving you relationship advice based on a million Reddit threads it was trained on? Does it actually understand anything about anything, or are you just getting the statistically likely answer based on terabytes of casual human conversation with all of their misunderstandings, myths, falsehoods, lies, and confident incompetence? Is it just telling me what I want to hear?

> Literally same shit my parents would say while I was cross-checking multiple websites for information and they were watching the only TV channel that our antenna would pick up.

Interesting analogy, because I am the one who's still trying to cross-check multiple websites of information while you blissfully watch your only available TV channel.

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in Customer Success so I have to screenshare with a decent number of engineers working for customers - startups and BigCos. The number of them who just blindly put shit into an AI prompt is incredible. I don't know if they were better engineers before LLMs? But I just watch them blindly pass flags that don't exist to CLIs and then throw their hands up. I can't imagine it's faster than a (non-LLM) Google search…

Reading this, I'm wondering if I'm suffering "Long Covid" I've recently had tons of memory and brain fog. I thought it was related to stress, and it's severe enough that I'm on medical leave from work right now My memory is absolutely terrible Do you know if it is possible to test or verify if it's COVID related?

Try taurine supplements. If you feel better it could be Long Covid.

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Exactly this. As soon as enough people get screwed by the ~80% accuracy rate, the whole facade will crumble. Unless AI companies manage to bring the accuracy up 20% in the next year, by either limiting scope or finding new methods, it will crumble. That kind of accuracy gain isn't happening with LLMs alone (ie foundational models).

My team has measurably gotten our LLM feature to have ~94% accuracy in widespread reliable tests. Seems fairly confident, speaking as an SWE not a DS orML engineer though.

Yeah, I've had similar results. Even with GPT-o1, I find almost all errors at this point come from the web search functionality and the model taking X random source as an authority. It's interesting that I find my human intelligence in the process is most useful for hand-collecting the sources and data to analyze -- and, of course, for directing the process across multiple LLM queries.

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the second point, it’s worth noting how many of the most vocal and well-positioned critics of LLMs (Marcus/Pinker in particular) represent the still academically dominant but now known to be losing side of the debate over connectionism. The anthology from the 90s Talking Nets is phenomenal to see how institutionally marginalized figures like Hinton were until very recently. Off-topic, but I couldn’t find your cont…

Thanks for the advice. Currently I have a €100k job where I sit and do nothing. I'm wondering if I should coast while it lasts, or find something more meaningful

The timeless dilemma! I don't know how old you are, but just don't let the experience break your internal motivation as it can be hard to recover -- and remember however much 100k is and however much you save, it's still many years at that salary to genuine retirement. I don't know what equity packages are like these days at OpenAI/Anthropic, but especially if you're interested in the topic and have strong beliefs about how AI should play out in the world it's worth considering rolling the dice on a 2-4 year sprint. I imagine SA type positions at either of those companies are some of the most interesting roles, especially working in legacy industries/government [1], since you'd get to see firsthand how/where it's most effective (to say nothing of honing your language skills). Good luck regardless!

[1] https://openai.com/careers/solutions-architect-public-sector... for example - listed salary is 2x your current in the US, not sure what the salary is like in the EU.

Re: Bad Actors Are Grooming LLMs to Produce Falsehoods

#299
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