this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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Fuck AI

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... and neither does the author (or so I believe - I made them both up).

On the other hand, AI is definitely good at creative writing.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I have a very unusual last name. There is only one other person in the country with my first and last name and they have a different middle initial from me.

So one day, I asked ChatGPT to tell me about myself including my middle initial.

Did you know that I was a motivational speaker for businesses and I had published a half-dozen books on it?

Because I didn't.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is because there is a Mr. Flying Thomas Squid, living in another country, who is a motivational speaker and who didn't work in (... video ?).

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Good theory, but this Mr. Flying Thomas Squid that ChatGPT talked about lived in the U.S. like me.

(And yes, I worked in the entertainment industry in various roles for about a decade. Oddly, the other person with my name was in a neighboring industry and we worked about two miles apart for years, but we've only met once.)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

today's LLMs do hallucinate a lot ... I wouldn't eat mushrooms from harvesting books written by LLMs (they do exist).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Oh yeah, I would never, ever trust my life to an LLM.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I would if the OpenAI were held accountable for my demise.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I should try that. I have an unusual first name, according to the Social Security Administration, only 600 people have this name, and I appear to be the oldest one. Also no one else has my first and last name. I should try that out.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Claude 3.5 Sonnet, using the same exact prompt:

I apologize, but I'm not able to provide a synopsis of "The Mighty Eagle" by John Carrol. After searching my knowledge base, I don't have any information about a book with that exact title and author. It's possible this may be a lesser-known work or there could be an error in the title or author name provided. Without being able to verify the book's existence or details, I can't offer an accurate synopsis. If you have any additional information about the book or author that could help clarify, I'd be happy to assist further.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Both Llama 3.1 8B and 70B also answered the book doesn’t exist.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

More like creative bullshitting.

It seems that Mitchell was simply an astronaut not an engineer.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is why I never raw dog ChatGPT

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Hallucinations are so strong with this one too… like really bad.

If I can’t already or won’t be able/willing to verify an output, I ain’t usin’ it - not a bad rule I think.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I never walk away with an "answer" without having it:

  1. Cite the source
  2. Lookup the source
  3. Permlink you to the source page/line as available
  4. Critique the validity of the source.

After all that, still remain skeptical and take the discussion as a starting point to find your own primary sources.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

That’s good. Ooh NotebookLM from Google just added in-line citations (per Hard Fork podcast). I think that’s the way: see what looks interesting (mentally trying not to take anything to heart) and click and read as usual.

BeyondPDF for Mac does something similar: semantic searches your document but simply returns likely matches, so it’s just better search for when you don’t remember specific words you read or want to find something without knowing the exact search criteria.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

At least Bing will cite sources, and hell, sometimes they even align with what it said.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Heh yeah if the titles of webpages from its searches were descriptive enough

Funny that they didn’t have a way to stop at claiming it could browse websites. Last I checked you could paste in something like

https://mainstreamnewswebsite.com/dinosaurs-found-roaming-playground

and it would tell you which species were nibbling the rhododendrons.

…wow still works, gonna make a thread

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Clowning

(I’m not smart enough to leverage a model/make a bot like this but they’ve had too long not to close this obvious misinformation hole)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

On the other hand, AI is definitely good at creative writing.

Well...yeah. That's what it was designed to do. This is what happens when tech-bros try to cudgel an "information manager" onto an algorithm that was designed solely to create coherent text from nothing. It's not "hallucinating" - it's following its core directive.

Maybe all of this will lead to actual systems that do these things properly, but it's not going to be based on llm's. That much seems clear.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Not to be that guy, but it’s worse than that. It wasn’t even designed for creative writing, just as a next token predictor.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That's kind of like saying a wheel wasn't designed to move things around, that it's just a thick circle. My point above wasn't that things can never change - iteration can lead to amazing things. But we can't put an empty chassis on some wheels and call it a car, either.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

Tried it with ChatGPT 4o with a different title/author. Said it couldn't find it. That it might be a new release or lesser-known title. Also with a fake title and a real author. Again, said it didn't exist.

They're definitely improving on the hallucination front.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

John Carrol actually is real but is a musician, it seems.

https://johncarrollmusic.bandcamp.com/album/everybody-smokes-in-hell

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

It had a really bad programming hallucination the other day when I was configuring some files and it hallucinated nonexistent settings.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

It even changed the spelling of the name

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Please share a link to the conversation instead of just the screenshot.

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