Fuck AI

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ would I get downvoted for saying skill issue lol?

I have recently used llms for troubleshooting/assistance with exposing some self hosted services publicly through a VPS I recently got. I'm not a novice but I'm no pro either when it comes to the Linux terminal.

Anyway long story short in that instance the tool (llm) was extremely helpful in not only helping me correctly implement what I wanted but also explaning/teaching me as I went. I find llms are very accurate and helpful for the types of things I use it for.

But to answer your question on why llms can be wrong, it's because they are guessing machines that just pick the next best word. They aren't smart at all, they aren't "ai" they are large language models.

The thing about LLMs is that they "store" information about the shape of their training models, not about the information contained therein. That information is lost.

A LLM will produce text that looks like the texts it was trained with, but it only can only reproduce any information contained in them if it's common enough in its training data to statistically affect their shape, and even then it has a chance to get it wrong, since it has no way to check its output for fact accuracy.

Add to that that most models are pre-prompted to sound confident, helpful, and subservient (the companies' main goal not being to provide information, but to get their customers hooked on their product and coming back for more), and you get the perfect scammers and yes-men. Auto-complete mentalists that will give you as much confident sounding information shaped nonsense as you want, doing their best to agree with you and confirm any biases you might have, with complete disregard for accuracy, truth, or the effects your trust in their output might have (which makes them extremely dangerous and addictive for suggestible or intellectually or emotionally vulnerable users).

LLMs only output fan-fiction of our reality.

I like to think of them as artificial con men. They sound great. They have confidence and are complimentary and are very agreeable, but they will tell you what they think you want to hear. Whether or not what they are telling you is truthful isn't even part of the equation.

I almost always get perfect responses, but I'm very limited in what I'll input. Often I'm just using ChatGPT to remember a word or event I've forgotten. Pretty much 100% accurate on that bit.

Couldn't explain how I know what will and won't work, but I have a sense of it. Also, the farther you drill into a thing, the more off-topic it gets. I'm almost always one and done with a prompt.

The first time I ever used it I got a bugged response. I asked it to give me a short summary of the 2022 Super Bowl, and it told me Patrick Mahomes won the Super Bowl with a field goal kick.

Now, those two things separately are true. Mahomes won. The game was won on a field goal.

The LLM just looks at the probability that the sentences it's generating are correct based on its training data, and it smashed two correct statements together thinking that was the most probable reasonable response.

It does that a lot. Don't use GenAI without checking its output.

Much of the Input Comedy from the Web now, not the web 2003.

I've used it a few times to quickly check some reference values, calculations and symptoms (research/physiology) and most of the time its fine but occasionally it spits out some of the craziest shit i've ever seen, like dangerously wrong but its just as confident.