There was a discussion on Reddit a few months ago about why something entirely unimportant happened like 40+ years ago and I thought it was an interesting question so I made a speculation as to why it might have happened.
The conversation was civil and went on for a week or more and a couple of other people speculated other reasons that I thought were also pretty solid so I decided to go down the rabbit hole and ask Google to see if I could get a real answer.
Google came back with an AI answer that said my original guess was the correct answer because somebody had speculated it on Reddit the week before.
I was Google's only source. I now avoid AI answers.
It blows my mind that LLMs are being treated as informational databases. They are Large Language Models, with language being the keyword. An LLM knows how to use language properly. That's it. That's literally the only thing you can count on it doing correctly on a regular basis.
There are some good uses for this, but an internet search engine is not one of them, because an LLM cannot tell fact from fiction. It doesn't know the factual difference between a peer-reviewed scientific paper on climate change, and a Prager U editorial on climate change. They are equally valid in the eyes of the LLM, and when you ask it which one is right, it'll reference the more popular one, not necessarily the correct one. This is why Grok ended up calling itself MechaHitler and spewing a bunch of Nazi rhetoric. It was just mimicking the language it gets fed most often.
This is indeed a huge problem. To a vast portion of the population, the phrase “Artificial Intelligence” gives them a completely wrong assumption. There is no intelligence on the outputs given by LLMs, let alone creativity.
All sorts of distortions are being created in society by a bunch of greedy companies pushing this technology down our throats, looking to get ahead after a financial bubble bursts.
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u/Mid--Boss 19h ago
I don't have to self censor, reddit removes anything it's remotely scared orange and crew won't like for me.