I have been using "new" Siri on iOS similarly but less dangerously. Pointing my camera at dogs at the dog park and seeing how well Siri identifies them. Pretty impressed so far. I am not eating them tho.
Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?
41–50 of 81 posts
Re: Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?
#42Trusting an LLM with a decision that can potentially be fatal is a good Darwin test I suppose. Sadly I don’t think the general populace understands that LLMs are unreliable. (And even people in tech can vastly overestimate the capabilities.. at least judging by the insane spending on them).
> ...even people in tech can vastly overestimate the capabilities...
I think people in (software) tech are currently more prone to overestimate the capabilities, because LLMs in a harness are genuinely excellent at programming. Programming is the perfect LLM task since 1. it's symbolic manipulation, 2. there is a vast corpus of high quality training data, and 3. most mistakes can be harmlessly caught at compile-time or unit-test-time. Especially point 3 makes it so that just throwing more "effort" at a problem, something the machine is endlessly willing to do, virtually guarantees an improved result.
In contrast there is no way for the machine to write a unit test to double-check its work when what it's offering the user is a legal document, or a medical diagnosis, or a recommendation of "yep that mushroom is safe to eat".
I've often seen the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" referenced with respect to LLMs. It is said that most people can tell the LLM is not great at their own subject of expertise, yet they still trust it for other subjects where they can't personally assess the quality of its answers. Imagine how bad this is when the LLM actually is great at the thing you have expertise in.
Re: Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?
#43Love this idea. We should encourage every AI enthusiast to eat wild mushrooms using their sycophantic bullshit machine to determine each one's safety. Who benefits? Society
Did you read the post or just decide to advertise your dislike of AI by wishing ill on others?
Re: Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?
#44Love this idea. We should encourage every AI enthusiast to eat wild mushrooms using their sycophantic bullshit machine to determine each one's safety. Who benefits? Society
Did you read the post or just decide to advertise your dislike of AI by wishing ill on others?
Both :) happy hunting!
Re: Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?
#45[deleted]
Re: Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?
#46Is it possible to reliably (>99%) identify mushrooms from a single image, with any method? All image datasets have an intrinsic minimum error that comes from the limit of information in the data, regardless of what model or method you use to analyze it. You might not be able to tell apart two similar-looking mushroom species just by looking.
many species of mushroom cant be identified just by looking, spore print is a necessary differentiator for many species, and as the article notes, for some species DNA sequencing is the only way to be sure.
Re: Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?
#47The check can't be just a fast glance because an incorrect answer for sure looks exactly the same as a correct one. From my experience a separate pass with verification of the source is required.
Re: Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?
#48The single best animated data visualization to demonstrate the stochastic nature of LLM models: an animation of the probability of solving a long multiplication problem over several runs. [0]
Re: Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?
#49Giving the impossibly high standards people here have for identifying a mushroom, it’s a wonder that they would eat a mushroom at all. You may not trust an LLM, but how would you even trust yourself? Who would you ever trust?
I don’t anyone here has indicated that they have "impossible" standards. If you think "gather only mushrooms that you definitely recognize as edible; if you have any doubts, leave it be" is impossibly high, I’m not sure what to say. Of course what "definitely recognize" means in terms of the odds of a false positive is subjective, so sometimes people get poisoned. Even more rarely a poisoning leads to death, but people who die from mushrooms they have picked are those who didn’t heed the warning at all.
Mushrooms are best treated like firearms; that’s not an impossibly high standard.
Re: Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?
#50[deleted]