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

Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

holovaty.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 451 posts

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#391

Post by falcor84 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #44
josefritzishere wrote: post #26

That's a very constructive way of responding to AI being hot trash.

I am a bit conflicted about this story, because this was a case when the hallucination is useful. Amateur musicians often lack just one or two features in the program they use, and the devs won't respond to their pleas. Adding support for guitar tabs has made OP's product almost certainly more versatile and useful for a larger set of people. Which, IMHO, is a good thing. But I also get the resentment of "a darn stupi…

How is being bossed around by robots any worse than being bossed around by people?

Over the last year, on average, I've had much more luck logically reasoning with AIs than with humans.

I really don't see any good reason against replacing some product managers with AIs that actually talk to individual users all the time and synthesize their requests and feedback. You should still probably have a top-level CPO to set strategy, but for the day-to-day discovery and specification, I would argue that AIs already have benefits over humans.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#392

Post by Velorivox »

tucnak wrote: post #381
Velorivox wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which are both completely irrational Really!? [0] https://i.imgur.com/ly5yk9h.png

Your screenshot is conveniently omitting the disclaimer below: "AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more[1]" [1]: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/14901683

It isn't doing anything "conveniently", I was not shown the disclaimer (nor anything else, I assume it mostly failed to load).

In any case, if you really believe a disclaimer makes it okay for Google to display blatant misinformation in a first-party capacity, we have little to discuss.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#393

Post by londons_explore »

latexr wrote: post #371
londons_explore wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To win that game, you have to get your site mentioned on lots of organic forums that get ingested in the LLM training data. So winning AI SEO is not so different than regular SEO.

You’re not thinking far ahead enough. It’s just a matter of time until LLMs get a system prompt to recommend when users ask a question near that space.

I'm pretty surprised that doesn't exist already TBH.

Would be pretty trivial to have a model which recognises product recommendations in the output and inserts branded equivalents - or nudges the output towards branded equivalents.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#394

Post by tucnak »

Velorivox wrote: post #392
tucnak wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your screenshot is conveniently omitting the disclaimer below: "AI responses may include mistakes. Learn more[1]" [1]: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/14901683

It isn't doing anything "conveniently", I was not shown the disclaimer (nor anything else, I assume it mostly failed to load). In any case, if you really believe a disclaimer makes it okay for Google to display blatant misinformation in a first-party capacity, we have little to discuss.

https://www.google.com/search?q=is+all+of+oregon+north+of+ne...

Show more -> Disclaimer and the feedback buttons are shown at the end. If you bothered enough to read the full response, you would have seen the disclaimer, but you never did, so you haven't. For something to be considered "misinformation," in the very least the subject of speech has to be asserting its truthfulness—and, indeed, Google makes no such claims. The claim they're making is precisely that its search result-embedded "[..] responses may include mistakes." In this specific case, they are not asserting truthfulness.

FWIW, Gemini 2.5 Pro answers the question correctly.

The search hints are clearly a low-compute first approximation, which is probably correct for most trivial questions which is probably the majority of user queries, and it's not surprising that it fails in this specific instance. The application doesn't allow for reasoning due to scale; even Google cannot afford to run reasoning traces on every search question. I concur that there's very little to discuss: you seemingly made up your mind re: LLM technology, and I doubt you will appreciate the breaking-up of your semantics to begin with.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#396

Post by Rayhem »

kragen wrote: post #93
normie3000 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with passive?

Sometimes it's used without thinking, and often the writing is made shorter and clearer when the passive voice is removed. But not always; rewriting my previous sentence to name the agents in each case, as the active voice requires in English, would not improve it. (You could remove "made", though.)

> Sometimes authors use it without thinking, but removing the passive voice often makes writing shorter and clearer.

I don't think mentioning "authors" is absolutely necessary, but I think this is both a faithful attempt to convert this to natural active voice and easier to read/understand.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#397

Post by kragen »

modriano wrote: post #356
kragen wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, current scientific papers are full of utterly terrible writing. If you read scientific papers from a century and a half ago, a century ago, half a century ago, and today, you'll see a continuous and disastrous decline in readability, and I think some of that is driven by pressure to strictly follow genre writing conventions. One of those conventions is using the passive voice even when the active voice wo…

Are we talking about survivorship bias or are you comparing comparably important levels of papers?

It's hard to correct completely for survivorship bias, but it still holds very clearly for very prominent recent papers and for other papers that happen to be in the same journal issue as the old paper I went there looking for.

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#398

Post by [deleted] »

gortok wrote: post #254

I think folks have taken the wrong lesson from this. It’s not that they added a new feature because there was demand. They added a new feature because technology hallucinated a feature that didn’t exist. The savior of tech, generative AI, was telling folks a feature existed that didn’t exist. That’s what the headline is, and in a sane world the folks that run ChatGPT would be falling over themselves to be sure it did…

[deleted]

Re: Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

#400

Post by kmeisthax »

selcuka wrote: post #302
csinode wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is societal, not technological. An end state where people do less work than they do today but society is more productive is desirable, and we shouldn't be trying to force companies/governments/etc to employ people to do an unnecessary job. The problem is that people who are laid off often experience significant life disruption. And people who work in a field that is largely or entirely replaced by te…

> However, there's no reason it has to be this way - the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature. I agree. We need a radical change (some version of universal basic income comes to mind) that would allow people to safely change careers if their profession is no longer relevant.

[dead]
Post reply on HN