Fuck AI

It's amazing that they get it right 40 % of the time then.

The only thing Gemini is good for is bringing up sources that don't appear in the regular Google search results. Which only leads to another question: why are those links not in the regular Google search results?

Infinite money, all the data on the internet, and nothing to show for it. I wrote about my experience with Gemini assistant for people who enjoy suffering.

I have found AI to be a terrible primary source. But something I've found very useful is to ask for a detailed response, structured a certain way. Then tell the AI to grade it as a professor would. It actually does a very good job at acknowledging gaps and giving an honest grade then.

AI shouldn't be a primary source but it's great for starting a topic. Similar to talking to someone that's moderately in the know on something you interested in

That's because ALL generative AI results, even the correct ones, are "made up". They just exist on a spectrum of coincidental correspondence with reality. I'm still surprised that they manage to get as much right as they do.

I looked up on google at one point what the minimum required depth for a cable running under a building is by NEC code. It told me it was 0 inches. I laughed and called it stupid, wtf do you mean 0 inches?? Upon further research, 0 inches is the correct answer, I felt real stupid after that -_-

Yeah, LLMs are great if you treat them like a tool to create drafts or give you ideas, rather than like an encyclopedia.

You can tell it “you made that data up, do not do that”

I wish people would stop treating these tools as intelligent.

I'll get hate for this but in most tasks people use them for they are pretty dang accurate. I'm talking about frontier models fyi

A thousand wrong answers are more innovative than a single correct one.

The core of the scam is making people believe that "novel" is the same as "better".

That’s one of my skills as a certified genius. I’m wicked fast at math.

37/2.4 boom 16.38.

Is it right, maybe, maybe not. But I did it fast

Would be weird for an ad to bash on the paid tier

You shouldn't use them to keep up with the news. They make that option available because it's wanted, but they shouldn't.

It should only be used to research older data from its original dataset, perhaps adding to it a bit with newer knowledge if you're a specialist in the field.

When you ask the right questions in the right way, you'll get the right answers, or at least mostly - and you should always check the sources after. But it's a specialists tool at this time. And most people are not specialists.

So this whole "Fuck AI" movement is actually pretty damn stupid. It's good to point out its flaws, try and make people aware and help guide it better into the future.

But it's actually useful, and not going away. You're just using it wrong, and as the tech progresses, ways to use it wrong will decrease. You can't stop progress, humanity will always come with new things, evolution is designed that way.

This is the most common response from AI on search pages when I'm trying to find some kind of setting.

That’s the most infuriating thing.

I’m trying to learn how to do new things, well, basically all the time.
Right now I’m stalled out on a sorta important personal project to teach myself about containers/micro-services/certs in a homelab environment. And what I’m discovering is that I don’t know enough to know I don’t know enough - it used to be that I’d take on an ambitious project, mess up, figure out how to overcome that, then learn by looking at what did work, and do better in the future.
But every technical project lately has gotten to the point where I’m trying to just get something, anything, to work or make sense, but every convincing enough AI generated page sets me back by several days as I troubleshoot the convincing enough steps and find myself realizing they’re referencing YAML settings from apps that aren’t part of the service, that every page directs me to install Python, Node, or whatever other helper app directly on my machine that would normally run in a container (which defeats the purpose of trying to containerize things - some stuff I want to use relies on non-compatible versions/configurations). There’s a very clear disconnect from what I’m seeing and what I’m understanding, and the utter lack of authoritative information/proliferation of useless info has just crippled my ability to identify and resolve the disconnect. It’s honestly soul crushing.

But they are used like search engine... A lot... That is a huge issue.

They do have search functionality. For Perplexity it's even the main focus. Yeah, it's hard to stop them from confidently making things up.

Perplexity is the only one I would think of using seriously, and then only when I want it to, say, summarize something I already know.

After which I fact-check it like crazy and hammer at it until it gets things right.

One annoying habit it has is that somewhere in the chain of software before or after the LLM it looks for certain key topics it doesn't want to talk about and either comes out and says it (anything involving violence or crime) or has a visibly canned hot take that it repeats without variance no matter what added information you provide or how much cajoling you try.

At other points it starts into the canned responses, but when you catch it it will try again. Like I frequently want song lyrics translated and each time I supply some that it recognizes as such it throws up a canned response about how it will not be a party to copyright breaking. Then after a few rounds back and forth about how I'm clearly not doing this commercially and am just a fan who wants to understand a song better it will begrudgingly give me the translation.

Then five minutes later in the SAME CONVERSATION it will run through that cycle all over again when I give it another song.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Perplexity is by far the best for searching but still copiously hallucinates.

Yeah, this isn't a general test of "factualness", it's a very narrow and specific subset of capability that many of these AIs were not designed for.

That being said, it does not change my already poor opinion of generative AI.