Technology

I have a few friends at the Beeb, albeit not in the newsroom, and they have a blanket ban on ALL GenAI tools that aren't self-hosted. I would be very surprised if IT at the BBC wasn't blocking Apple Intelligence outright.

Although reading the article, I can't really tell if this means content was rewritten on the BBC content side, or a hallucination on-device using BBC content.

What are the odds that all these stories about LLMs being terrible, and the crappy publicly available ones, are all just to convince us that they suck so nobody notices when actually good AI gets used?

There's a famous quote attributed to Charles Babbage with regard to his difference engine (or some other calculation machine of his invention) which goes: "On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

Apprehension is right, Mr. Babbage. You were lucky to find yourself talking to those who, in some unconscious way, suspected that something might be wrong in their thinking, leading them to at least enquire. There are those whose ideas are so confused, or even so completely lacking, that they will assume that no matter what is put into the machine, the right answers will come out.

LLMs are useful for a great deal of things, particularly offline translation without having to send data to Google's servers. Sometimes I want to send a long message to friends and family but don't want to write it in English, Polish, and Hindi.

But who thought using it for news headlines was a good idea?! Given the tens of thousands of news headlines published daily, some of them are statistically guaranteed to be falsely presented by AI.

E: not sure whether people are downvoting because they want Google to have their data, they don't want people from different cultures talking to one another, or because they want AI-altered news stories.

“Intelligence”

AI-generated products can be a bad fit for news

No shit. The fact they only discovered that once they've got burned proves they never even questioned what generative AI does.

Though I'm sure half of the blame is from them asking it to tack the most clickbaity headlines on every article they can. Even human editors all but outright lie in those, of course an AI is going to hallucinate you the best title it can.

In addition to pushing something before it’s ready and where it’s not welcome, Apple’s own stinginess completely screwed them over.

What do LLMs need to be smart? RAM, both for their weights and holding real data to reference. What has apple relentlessly price gouged and skimped on for years? Yeah, I’ll give you one guess…

Ahh yes, the sales and marketing hype of AI continues while the public is still being fed this bullshit.

claiming that Luigi Mangione [...] had shot himself.

AI-generated content is prone to inaccuracies

Somebody would call that an "inaccuracy"?

If I serve you a pile of lukewarm shit on a plate and say here's your dinner, would anybody call that an "inaccuracy"??

I say, life and death is even more than that.

the hallucinations will continue until morale improves