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My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

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Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#91

Post by thfuran »

3rodents wrote: post #34
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 agree that absolute deference to doctors is a mistake and that individuals should be encouraged to advocate for themselves (and doctors should be receptive to it) but I'm not so convinced in this specific case. Why do high blood sugar levels matter? Are there side effects associated with the alternative treatment? Has ChatGPT actually helped you in a meaningful way, or has the doctor's eventual relenting made you f…

Yeah, and "I found one paper that says X" is very weak evidence even if you're correctly interpreting X and the specific context in which the paper says it.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#92

Post by bergutman »

avree wrote: post #28
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…

No, no, no. You can change your doctor, and get one that listens to you - you can't change the fact that ChatGPT has no skin in the game - no reputation, no hippocratic oath, no fiscal/legal responsibility. Some people have had miracles with Facebook groups, or WebMD, but that doesn't change where the role of a doctor is or mean that you should be using those things for medical advice as opposed to something that all…

> No, no, no. You can change your doctor

As an American on ACA this made me chuckle.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#93

Post by coliveira »

rgoulter wrote: post #88
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.

Chatting with an LLM resembles chatting with a person. A human might be "empathetic", "infinitely patient, infinitely available". And (say) a book or a calculator is infinitely available. -- When chatting with an LLM, you get an interface that's more personable than a calculator without being less available. I know the LLM is predicting text, & outputting whatever is most convincing. But it's still tempting to say "t…

> But it's still tempting to say "thank you" after the LLM generates a response which I found helpful

I don't think it's helpful because I don't interact with objects.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#94

Post by zdc1 »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #85
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…

> and unbelievably knowledgeable They are knowledgeable in that so much information sits in their repository. But less than perfect application of that information combined with the appearance of always perfect confidence can lead to problems. I treat them like that one person in the office who always espouses alternate theories - trust it as far as I can verify it. This can be very handy for finding new paths of inq…

And for better or worse it feels like the errors are being "pushed down" into smaller, more subtle spaces.

I asked ChatGPT a question about a made up character in a made up work and it came back with "I don’t actually have a reliable answer for that". Perfect.

On the other hand, I can ask it about varnishing a piece of wood and it will give a lovely table with options, tradeoffs, and Good/Ok/Bad ratings for each option, except the ratings can be a little off the mark. Same thing when asking what thickness cable is required to carry 15A in AU electrical work. Depending on the journey and line of questioning, you would either get 2.5mm^2 or 4mm^2.

Not wrong enough to kill someone, but wrong enough that you're forced to use it as a research tool rather than a trusted expert/guru.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#95

Post by StephenMelon »

zdc1 wrote: post #94
_carbyau_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and unbelievably knowledgeable They are knowledgeable in that so much information sits in their repository. But less than perfect application of that information combined with the appearance of always perfect confidence can lead to problems. I treat them like that one person in the office who always espouses alternate theories - trust it as far as I can verify it. This can be very handy for finding new paths of inq…

And for better or worse it feels like the errors are being "pushed down" into smaller, more subtle spaces. I asked ChatGPT a question about a made up character in a made up work and it came back with "I don’t actually have a reliable answer for that". Perfect. On the other hand, I can ask it about varnishing a piece of wood and it will give a lovely table with options, tradeoffs, and Good/Ok/Bad ratings for each opti…

I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek to tell me about a contemporary Scottish indie band that hasn’t had a lot of press coverage. ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok all gave good answers based on the small amount of press coverage they have had.

DeepSeek however hallucinated a completely fictional band from 30 years ago, right down to album names, a hard luck story about how they’d been shafted by the industry (and by whom), made up names of the members and even their supposed subsequent collaborations with contemporary pop artists.

I asked if it was telling the truth or making it up and it doubled down quite aggressively on claiming it was telling the truth. The whole thing was very detailed and convincing yet complete and utter bollocks.

I understand the difference in the cost/parameters etc. but it was miles behind the other 3, in fact it wasn’t just behind it was hurtling in the opposite direction, while being incredibly plausible.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#96

Post by fwipsy »

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…

Technically they don't have incentives either. It's just difficult to talk about something that walks, swims, flies, and quacks without referring to duck terminology.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#97

Post by fwipsy »

Chatbots aren't better than doctors can be. But in the US, doctors are a highly credentialed position, therefore expensive, therefore their time is split into minimal parcels. (Still longer than 5 minutes at least!!) In my experience, chatbots are often better than doctors are in the real world, at least for savvy users.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#98

Post by anonymous908213 »

StephenMelon wrote: post #95
zdc1 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for better or worse it feels like the errors are being "pushed down" into smaller, more subtle spaces. I asked ChatGPT a question about a made up character in a made up work and it came back with "I don’t actually have a reliable answer for that". Perfect. On the other hand, I can ask it about varnishing a piece of wood and it will give a lovely table with options, tradeoffs, and Good/Ok/Bad ratings for each opti…

I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek to tell me about a contemporary Scottish indie band that hasn’t had a lot of press coverage. ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok all gave good answers based on the small amount of press coverage they have had. DeepSeek however hallucinated a completely fictional band from 30 years ago, right down to album names, a hard luck story about how they’d been shafted by the industry (and by wh…

This is by no means unique to DeepSeek, and that it happened with specifically DeepSeek seems to be luck of the draw for you (in this case it's entirely possible the band's limited press coverage was not in DeepSeek's training data). You can easily run into it from trying to use ChatGPT as a Google search too. A couple of weeks ago I posed the question "Do any esoteric programming languages with X and Y traits exist?" and it generated three fictional languages while asserting they were real. Further prompting led it to generate great detail about their various features and tradeoffs, as well as making up the people responsible for creating the language and other aspects of the fictional languages' history.

Re: My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

#99

Post by Yiin »

coliveira wrote: post #93
rgoulter wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chatting with an LLM resembles chatting with a person. A human might be "empathetic", "infinitely patient, infinitely available". And (say) a book or a calculator is infinitely available. -- When chatting with an LLM, you get an interface that's more personable than a calculator without being less available. I know the LLM is predicting text, & outputting whatever is most convincing. But it's still tempting to say "t…

> But it's still tempting to say "thank you" after the LLM generates a response which I found helpful I don't think it's helpful because I don't interact with objects.

it says more about you than the objects in question, because it's natural to react empathetically to natural sounding conversation, and if you don't, you're emotionally closer to that object than avg person. Whether to be proud of that or not is another question.
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