this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Is it only me, or is the linked article not super long on details & is reaching a conclusion from 2 examples? This is important & I need to hear more, & I’m generally biased against AI at this point— but the article isn’t doing enough to convince me

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

did you click through to any of the inline citations? David’s shorter articles on pivot mostly gather and summarize those, so if you need to read the original research and its conclusions that’s where to go

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Dang everyone here needs to look at a tree or a cat or something. Energy is wack in here

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I just went outside and appreciated the rendering

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Pretty nice right? I did the trees and cats.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

DANGER WILL ROBINSON, godposting detected

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

if people don't appreciate the kitties their tamagotchi is in some fucking trouble

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

i have seen the light from the helpful posters here, made up bullshit alleged summaries of documents are great actually

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

ATTN: If you're coming into this thread to say, "The output of AI is bad because your prompts suck," I'm just proud that you managed to figure out how to use the internet at all. Good job, you!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

remember remember, eternal september

(not that I much agree with the classist overtones of the original, but fuck me does it come to mind often)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

I keep having to remind people. Chatgpt is only as good as the prompt you give it. I am astounded as the amount of garbage that some people get, but I also know that it's generally because their prompts are garbage.

Sometimes it's output sucks, even with good input. But likely, if the output is bad, the input was bad.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

LLMs, and everyone who uses them to process information:

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Made strange choices about what to highlight.

They certainly do. For a while it was common to see AI-generated summaries under links to articles on lemmy, so I got a feel for them. Seems to me you would not need any fancy artificial intelligence to do equally well: Just take random excerpts, or maybe just read every third sentence.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ok? I don't have another human available to skim a shitload of documents for me to find answers I need and I don't have time to do ot myself. AI is my best option.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

So long as you don't care about whether they're the right or relevant answers, you do you, I guess. Did you use AI to read the linked post too?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I didn't read the post at all because its premise is irrelevant to my situation. If I had another human to read documentation for me I would do that. I don't so the next best thing is AI. I have to double check its findings but it gets me 95% of the way there and saves hours of work. It's a useful tool.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I didn't read the post at all

rather refreshing to have someone come out and just say it. thank you for the chuckle

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

we really do need “my source is that I made it the fuck up” for people who aggressively don’t want to read any of the text they’re allegedly commenting on

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

absolutely superb posting, thank you

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

everyone, we have a new worst poster

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Yep. Go ahead and ignore all the cases where it's getting answers correct and actually helping. We're all just hallucinating, it's in no way my lived experience. Your reality is the prime reality and we're the NPC's.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

sir has failed to achieve the reading comprehension level for this sub

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

And I wish only my good grades counted in school too.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (5 children)

I had GPT 3.5 break down 6x 45-minute verbatim interviews into bulleted summaries and it did great. I even asked it to anonymize people’s names and it did that too. I did re-read the summaries to make sure no duplicate info or hallucinations existed and it only needed a couple of corrections.

Beats manually summarizing that info myself.

Maybe their prompt sucks?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Did you conduct or read all the interviews in full in order to verify no hallucinations?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

I got AcausalRobotGPT to summarise your post and it said "I'm not saying it's always programming.dev, but"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

“Are you sure you’re holding it correctly?”

christ, every damn time

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

That is how tools tend to work, yes.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

we find they tend to post here, though not for long

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

it makes me feel fucking ancient to find that this dipshit didn't seem to get the remark, and it wasn't even that long ago

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Jobs is Tech Jesus, but Antennagate is only recorded in one of the apocryphal books

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

@RagnarokOnline @dgerard "They failed to say the magic spells correctly"

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (4 children)

You could use them to know what the text is about, and if it's worth your reading time. In this situation, it's fine if the AI makes shit up, as you aren't reading its output for the information itself anyway; and the distinction between summary and shortened version becomes moot.

However, here's the catch. If the text is long enough to warrant the question "should I spend my time reading this?", it should contain an introduction for that very purpose. In other words if the text is well-written you don't need this sort of "Gemini/ChatGPT, tell me what this text is about" on first place.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Both the use cases here are goverment documents. I'm baffled at the idea of it being "fine if the AI makes shit up".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

ChatGPT gives you a bad summary full of hallucinations and, as a result, you choose not to read the text based on that summary.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

(For clarity I'll re-emphasise that my top comment is the result of misreading the word "documents" out, so I'm speaking on general grounds about AI "summaries", not just about AI "summaries" of documents.)

The key here is that the LLM is likely to hallucinate the claims of the text being shortened, but not the topic. So provided that you care about the later but not the former, in order to decide if you're going to read the whole thing, it's good enough.

And that is useful in a few situations. For example, if you have a metaphorical pile of a hundred or so scientific papers, and you only need the ones about a specific topic (like "Indo-European urheimat" or "Argiope spiders" or "banana bonds").

That backtracks to the OP. The issue with using AI summaries for documents is that you typically know the topic at hand, and you want the content instead. That's bad because then the hallucinations won't be "harmless".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

But the claims of the text are often why you read it in the first place! If you have a hundred scientific papers you're going to read the ones that make claims either supporting or contradicting your research.

You might as well just skim the titles and guess.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

But the claims of the text are often why you read it in the first place!

By "not caring about the former" [claims], I mean in the LLM output, because you know that the LLM will fuck them up. But it'll still somewhat accurately represent the topic of the text, and you can use this to your advantage.

You might as well just skim the titles and guess.

Nirvana fallacy.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (8 children)

not reading the fucking sidebar and thinking this is high school debate club fallacy

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Unless it doesn't accurately represent the topic, which happens, and then a researcher chooses not to read the text based on the chatbot's summary.

Nirvana fallacy.

All these chatbots do is guess. I'm just saying a researcher might as well cut out the hallucinating middleman.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

No, it's just rambling. My bad.

I focused too much on using AI to summarise and ended not talking about it summarising documents, even if the text is about the later.

And... well, the later is such a dumb idea that I don't feel like telling people "the text is right, don't do that", it's obvious.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

You'd think so, but guess what precise use case LLMs are being pushed hard for.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Facts are not a data type for LLMs

I kind of like this because it highlights the way LLMs operate kind of blind and drunk, they're just really good at predicting the next word.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well, to be fair, AI can do it in seconds. Which beats humans.

But if that is relevant if the results are worthless is another question.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Yeah it changes the task from note taking or summarizing to proofreading.

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