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Moving in the right direction
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2026
1238 points (95.9% liked)
Fuck AI
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"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I disagree, knowledge should be easily accessed by everyone, they should only append it with a warning.
Some people can't afford seeing many lawyers and doctors, so it is cheaper to cross refrence with ai and do some online search.
This doesn't really work though. If it were simply directing you to actual sources that could help out (articles, and lawyer authored blogs or something), that would be one thing, but LLMs are just probability machines. It'll write out what looks like good sound reasoning and logic, but in reality it's simply the most probable word followed by the next most probable word, over and over again. It's using pattern matching, not knowledge
Have you used the newest LLM models? They certainly do fact checks, research info and provide online sources - if they are instructed to do that.
They output responses that read like fact checks, and link things that are semantically similar to their output.
LLMs don't understand concepts like "fact" and "source" though, so it's a stretch to say they "do fact checks" and "provide online sources".
Always remember, LLMs don't actually understand anything other than what order words typically go in. They're really good at it, sure, but don't let that trick you into thinking they have any deeper understanding than that.
I've tried on several occasions to try and explain this to people, and it's like they WANT it to be a sentient thing, and refuse all evidence to the otherwise.
So basically they do what humans do. What exactly qualifies as deeper understanding to you?
Being able to say "I don't know" rather than making shit up to fill in what it doesn't know. That would be a good start.
They do say that. I’ve seen Claude realise some programming package must be internal / non public and it therefore can’t provide any information on that.
It's nothing more than surface level though. Their "knowledge" is limited to whatever is present in their training data, and any claims it makes outside of that are manufactured based on statistics and it's knowledge of word order, not actual understanding of actual facts.
Just because it gets it right sometimes doesn't mean it knows it's right. Because, again, the only thing LLMs actually understand is word order.
No it’s not limited to their current training data. Like I said, they can search the internet, get information from websites or available studies, summarize and use that in their answers.
Again, how do you know?
Because I've studied LLMs and the underlying concepts they're based on.
Do you?
Yes
How do you know that you don't just guess words, too?
We need to both ban AI from this and make sure people have reasonable and affordable ways of accessing that info from human professionals
Except AI is an over engineered autocomplete operating completely off of statistical models. Knowledge is not statistical or random. I should get the same outputs to the same inputs.
Where does the thought come from? If you write five articles about the topic or any topic, will they be the same?
They won't look the same but they'll convey the same information consistently.
Even about topics that you barely are familiar with?
If the prompt includes the older articles, or if the NN is updated once an article is written, wouldn't AI be consistent, too?
Then I research from known references starting with Wikipedia and using the sources at the bottom of the page to expand my research out further.
The entirety of how LLMs work is token prediction based on the entire collective of human creation, that is not research, that is not understanding. that is an over engineered autocomplete. Guessing what the next token is in a string of characters is not the same knowledge of the topic. How much does the Epic of Gilgamesh and the complete works of Shakespeare and the writings of Adolf Hitler and the unhinged Tumblr posts of every Susie, Harry, and Jillian and all of the statistical models born from vectorizing all of that into a billion dimensional vectorspace have any impact on the final output, how does any of that have anything to do with any medical or legal inquiries?
Ive already explained multiple times how a glorified autocomplete predicting words is not knowledge. If you're going to keep sealioning I'm done with this conversation.