138
‘AI is no longer optional’ — Microsoft admits AI doesn’t help at work
(pivot-to-ai.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
138 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
2003 readers
307 users here now
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
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
FWIW, I work in a field that is mostly related to law and accounting. Unlike with coding, there are no simple "tests" to try out whether an AI's answer is correct or not. Of course, you could try these out in court, but this is not something I would recommend (lol).
In my experience, chatbots such as Copilot are less than useless in a context like ours. For more complex and unique questions (which is most of the questions we are dealing with everyday), it simply makes up smart-sounding BS (including a lot of nonexistent laws etc.). In the rare cases where a clear answer is already available in the legal commentaries, we want to quote it verbatim from the most reputable source, just to be on the safe side. We don't want an LLM to rephrase it, hide its sources and possibly introduce new errors. We don't need "plausible deniability" regarding plagiarism or anything like this.
Yet, we are being pushed to "embrace AI" as well, we are being told we need to "learn to prompt" etc. This is frustrating. My biggest fear isn't to be replaced by an LLM, not even by someone who is a "prompting genius" or whatever. My biggest fear is to be replaced by a person who pretends that the AI's output is smart (rather than filled with potentially hazardous legal errors), because in some workplaces, this is what's expected, apparently.
Aaaaaah. I know this person. They're an accountant. They recently learned about AI. They're starting to use it more at work. They're not technical. I told them about hallucinations. They said the AI rarely wrong. When he's not 100% convinced, he says he asks the AI to cite the source.... 🤦 I told him it can hallucinate the source! ... And then we went back to "it's rarely wrong though."
I am often wondering whether the people who claim that LLMs are "rarely wrong" have access to an entirely different chatbot somehow. The chatbots I tried were rarely ever correct about anything except the most basic questions (to which the answers could be found everywhere on the internet).
I'm not a programmer myself, but for some reason, I got the chatbot to fail even in that area. I took a perfectly fine JSON file, removed one semicolon on purpose and then asked the chatbot to fix it. The chatbot came up with a number of things that were supposedly "wrong" with it. Not one word about the missing semicolon, though.
I wonder how many people either never ask the chatbots any tricky questions (with verifiable answers) or, alternatively, never bother to verify the chatbots' output at all.
AI fans are people who literally cannot tell good from bad. They cannot see the defects that are obvious to everyone else. They do not believe there is such a thing as quality, they think it's a scam. When you claim you can tell good from bad, they think you're lying.
They're also very gleeful about finally having one upped the experts with one weird trick.
Up until AI they were the people who were inept and late at adopting new technology, and now they get to feel that they're ahead (because this time the new half-assed technology was pushed onto them and they didn't figure out they needed to opt out).
In other words, AIs are BS automated BS artists... being promoted breathlessly by BS artists.
That's why I find the narrative that we should resist working with LLMs because we would then train them and enable them to replace us problematic. That would require LLMs to be capable of doing so. I don't believe in this (except in very limited domains such as professional spam). This type of AI is problematic because its abilities are completely oversold (and because it robs us of our time, wastes a lot of power and pollutes the entire internet with slop), not because it is "smart" in any meaningful way.
I feel like this is happening.
When you're an expert in the subject matter, it's easier to notice when the AI is wrong. But if you're not an expert, it's more likely that everything will just sound legit. Or you won't be able to verify it yourself.
Oh, absolutely! In my field, the answers made up by an LLM might sound even more legit than the accurate and well-researched ones written by humans. In legal matters, clumsy language is often the result of facts being complex and not wanting to make any mistakes. It is much easier to come up with elegant-sounding answers when they don't have to be true, and that is what LLMs are generally good at.