You original comment is posted under mine.

I am going to assume you are responding to that.

… I wasn’t trying to trick it.

I was trying to use it.

This is relevant to my more recent reply to you… because it is an anecdotal example of how broadly useless this technology is.

…

I wasn’t aware the purpose of this joke meme thread was to act as a policy workshop to determine an actionable media campaign aimed at generating mass awareness of the economic downsides of LLMs, which wouldn’t fucking work anyway because LLMs are being pushed by a class of wealthy people who do not fucking care what the masses think, and have essentially zero reason at all to change their course of action.

What, we’re going to boycott the entire tech industry?

Vote them out of office?

These people are on video, on record saying basically, ‘eh, we’re not gonna save the climate, not happening, might as well burn it all down even harder, even faster, for a tiny percentage chance our overcomplicated autocomplete algorithm magically figures out how to fix everything afterward’.

…

And yes, I very intentionally used the phrase ‘understand how computers actually work’ to infantilize and demean corporate executives.

Because they are narcissistic priveleged sociopaths who are almost never qualified, almost always make idiotic decisions that will only benefit themselves and an increasingly shrinking number of people at the expense of the vast majority of people who know more and work harder than they do, and who often respond like children having temper tantrums when they are justly criticized.

Again, in the context of a joke meme thread.

Please get off your high horse, or at least ride it over to a trough of water if you want a reasonable place to try to convince it to drink in the manner in which you prefer.

Why do we expect a higher degree of trustworthiness from a novel LLM than we de from any given source or forum comment on the internet?

The stuff I’ve seen AI produce has sometimes been more wrong than anything a human could produce. And even if a human would produce it and post it on a forum, anyone with half a brain could respond with a correction. (E.g. claiming that an ordinary Slavic word is actually loaned from Latin.)

I certainly don’t expect any trustworthiness from LLMs, the problem is that people do expect it. You’re implicitly agreeing with my argument that it is not just that LLMs give problematic responses when tricked, but also when used as intended, as knowledgeable chatbots. There’s nothing “detached from actual usage” about that.

At what point do we stop hand-wringing over llms failing to meet some perceived level of accuracy and hold the people using it responsible for verifying the response themselves?

at this point I think it’s fair to blame the user for ignoring those warnings and not the models for not meeting some arbitrary standard

This is not an either-or situation, it doesn’t have to be formulated like this. Criticising LLMs which frequently produce garbage is in practice also directed at people who do use them. When someone on a forum says they asked GPT and paste its response, I will at the very least point out the general unreliability of LLMs, if not criticise the response itself (very easy if I’m somewhat knowledgeable about the field in question). This is practically also directed at the person who posted that, such as e.g. making them come off as naive and uncritical. (It is of course not meant as a real personal attack, but even a detached and objective criticism has a partly personal element to it.)

Still, the blame is on both. You claim that:

Theres a giant disclaimer on every one of these models that responses may contain errors or hallucinations

I don’t remember seeing them, but even if they were there, the general promotion and ways in which LLMs are presented in are trying to tell people otherwise. Some disclaimers are irrelevant for forming people’s opinions compared to the extensive media hype and marketing.

Anyway my point was merely that people do regularly misuse LLMs, and it’s not at all difficult to make them produce crap. The stuff about who should be blamed for the whole situation is probably not something we disagree about too much.

Sure. It depends on the topic. It also depends how good you are at searching. Personally, I don’t have any difficulty finding quality websites via Google or DuckDuckGo. Sometimes it requires refining the search terms, and many people don’t know how to do that properly. For certain topics, I might not. However, i stand by my assertion that some statistically generated text which you can trust at all is less useful than a good article on a topic. Is Wikipedia useful also? Yes, it is.

With basic search, it is extremely obvious that that feature does not exist.

With conversational search, the search itself gaslights you into believing it has this feature, as it understands how to syntactically parse the question, and then answers it confidently with a wrong answer.

I would much rather buy a car that cannot fly, knowing it cannot fly, than a car that literally talks to you and tells you it can fly, and sometimes manages to glide a bit, but also randomly nose dives into the ground whilst airborne.