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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

#71

Post by an0malous »

parl_match wrote: post #27
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…

responding "if you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it" really sets people off. they get very mad and ive had some even use ai to tell me why that's wrong. what differentiates you? you could tell me "type xyz into chatgpt" or even share a structured document link from their site. but when you're copy/pasting, then you're basically useless in the equation.

> responding "if you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it" really sets people off

That’s crazy, it seems like such an obviously fair policy to me. They rarely even read their own generated text. I don’t understand this mentality

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

#72

Post by apical_dendrite »

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]

As long as the leadership of AI companies and the prominent AI researchers are talking about P(doom) and eliminating 50% of white collar jobs, there will be a backlash. As long as the leadership of corporate America is using AI usage in performance metrics and shoving AI into every single product regardless of whether it actually helps the product, there will be a backlash.

If you tell people that there's a technology that's going to change every aspect of their lives whether they like it or not (and has a non-zero chance of ending humanity entirely) and you want to throw all available resources into building this technology as fast as possible, do not be surprised if people start instinctively cringing every time your technology is mentioned.

If Altman, Musk, Zuckerberg, Amodei, or any of these other people had been half as smart as Steve Jobs, they would have adopted his worldview of computing as a "bicycle for the mind" that enhances rather than replaces humans.

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

#73

Post by recursive »

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 anti AI wave still has so much work to do. Today I saw a duckduckgo ad selling how you can opt out of AI. This is the first ad I've seen suggesting the possibility that someone might not want to be maxing out AI in every possible way. This after seeing probably thousands of ads reference AI.

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

#74

Post by nomel »

code_biologist wrote: post #53
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…

Writing and videos produced before 2022 are the information equivalent of low-background steel (steel produced before the atom bomb era). Not all are precious, but they are important. AI influences are so pervasive at this point, even in informational writing from domain experts. Relentless grounding is my personal solution for my AI epistemic crisis, but it's an expensive solution in terms of time and effort, and tr…

What is "grounding"?

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

#75

Post by tithe »

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…

Henry Petroski in "To Engineer is Human" has a chapter about the advent of the calculator during the slide rule era, and that calculators (and later computers) eroded a structural engineer's "feel for the numbers", caused engineers to pursue work on the fringe of their abilities, and perhaps more seriously, limited their ability to verify the correctness of the computer's work (this was the era where, for the first time, a machine could perform orders of magnitude calculations more quickly than humans could). He outlines the collapse of the Hartford Civic Center [1] as a case study in when blindly trusting computer output goes wrong (and by sheer luck, no one was killed).

It feels like the example was cherry-picked, but the combination of "less accurate" and "more confident" made me immediately think of this disaster. I truly worry that it's going to take civilian deaths / liability before the proper use / place of these new technologies is adopted, but we could probably start with 1) not in safety critical systems, and 2) don't replace your specialists / experts with algorithms.

[1] https://www.engr.psu.edu/ae/thesis/failures/MKP/failures/fai...

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

#76

Post by encomiast »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #18

This study is pretty bad. The comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48970182 ) on the other link with the direct PDF explains the problem well, which is that nothing here being tested is specific to AI systems. This study gave people access to an LLM that the researchers knew would give incorrect answers to certain questions, and then quizzed people on those questions, with the option to not respond to a giv…

Agreed, the headline says "AI advice made people three times less accurate". But if we really want to know how accurate these people were, we need to know how accurate the AI system they use is. If the AI system is hobbled to a point where it is worse than they reasonably expect we can't blame the people or the AI system. This would be the same as claiming the listening to experts make people less accurate in a study that told experts to lie.

A better headline would read, "Very inaccurate AI made people less accurate" but this would make people naturally ask, "what about a reasonably accurate AI?".

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

#77

Post by beering »

sdfefcxv wrote: post #55
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…

Im not mad about this. As someone who rarely uses LLMs because I dont need to, nor does it benefit me - I work on stuff that is original for which LLMs are useless at - Im glad. I want everyone around me to get dumb as hell. It makes my path in life much easier and more successful.

You really do not want to live in a world where people around you are as dumb as hell. You don’t want your car mechanic, your restaurant chef, your local traffic engineer to be dumb as hell because that only makes your life worse.

Closer to you, you don’t want your customers, your coworkers, your friends, and your neighbors to be dumb as hell. Whatever you may gain by being the smartest one on your block is more than offset by the myriad ways in which dumb people make life worse.

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

#78

Post by godwinson__4-8 »

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…

Why limit this critique to one side of the reddit marketplace. If more and more answers are AI authored, it stands to reason more and more questions are as well.

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

#79

Post by talon8635 »

sdfefcxv wrote: post #55
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…

Im not mad about this. As someone who rarely uses LLMs because I dont need to, nor does it benefit me - I work on stuff that is original for which LLMs are useless at - Im glad. I want everyone around me to get dumb as hell. It makes my path in life much easier and more successful.

Oh boy this couldn’t be more wrong. A society overtaken by ignorance does not value you, the self proclaimed genius.

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

#80

Post by cucumber3732842 »

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

>but instead someone to relay the question to ChatGPT and post the result as if it is their own hard earned knowledge and insight.

>people aren’t just refusing to say “I don’t know” they’re actively seeking out opportunities to pretend they know things.

What? This is a joke right? Advice and information subreddits have been shallow blind leading blind crap like that and have been for at least a decade. The vote mechanism plus local culture rewards shallow "teennager just googled it" type responses (that AI is basically replacing here) that even people who don't know anything can agree on and punishes nuance and serious understanding.

Eventually the people who know their shit make a joke subreddit (which is inherently exclusive because you can't joke about something without knowing about it) and then at some point later people figure out that's where all the smart people are, start asking questions there instead and then it goes to shit in the same way.

AI is absolutely a lateral move here.

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