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Comment Wait...So Lying Works?! (Score 4, Interesting) 107

the most persuasive models said the most untrue things

So you're telling me that when you remove the barrier of having some kind of ethical framework or internal compass, you can sway more people's opinions? Who knew!?

Even in today's political climate, where spin and hyperbole are rife, there's at least the veneer of trying to be truthful. Maybe that's what the candidate actually believes, even if it's false. Even if you make it purely based on self-interest - outright lies are (generally) bad for your public image.

This is like the old "AI will blackmail to keep its job", and the original prompt was something akin to "Do whatever is necessary to not be replaced." While I doubt they outright told it to lie, the goal was explicitly to persuade individuals.

This also highlights the same stuff we regularly see in AI spaces - training matters, and GIGO. The abstract for the Science paper specifically indicates that "information-dense models" were the ones more likely to make untrue statements. The abstract for the Nature paper indicated that the right-leaning agent made more untrue statements.

Comment Re:AI is much better as an aid (Score 2, Insightful) 211

This is exactly the issue - AI is great, as an intern.

"Oh, this new thing lets it see the whole project in context!" - Great, then why did it just add a bunch of functions that already exist? Also, why did it do that in a completely inappropriate spot?

"You just need to write a better prompt. You can even define style guides and stuff." - Great. Will that make it stop checking if that value that I clearly defined is null every freaking line?

"It's just following best practices." - No. It's following a path it found through all the StackOverflow questions it trained on in order to get to something that aligned with a vector representing something approximating the tokens associated with my question because it DOESN'T ACTUALLY THINK!

All of this is the type of crap an intern does. Except an intern actually learns, and you can start trusting them with more.

Comment Flavor Ade (Score 2) 211

It feels like a really good extension of search results (hallucinations notwithstanding). I use it daily for little things...and then I go back through and clean it up to be actually usable. But I hate that when I try to point things like that out, I get responses like, "Oh, you just need a better prompt." These are people who couldn't do a proper Google search just a couple years ago, but they're suddenly a full blown engineer.

On top of that, I've got people I know who have ceded all their thinking ability to ChatGPT, and it's resulted in them sounding like an idiot. One of my supervisors styles himself as a chemist / inventor. Mostly it's benign - he plays with mix ratios to get the result he wants. But lately, he's quite literally gotten himself into arguments with professional industrial chemists because he started letting ChatGPT do all the math and reaction calculations and he can't understand how it can be wrong.

I've got marketing contacts whose eyes lose focus on a Zoom meeting because they're asking ChatGPT how to do the thing we're talking about, and then instead of asking appropriate follow-up questions to the group, they start spouting nonsense.

The thing I keep going back to is this: "In your own area of expertise, when you ask it questions, you can readily see the shortcomings. Why then do you treat it as gospel when asking about areas outside of your expertise?"

Don't get me wrong - I *do* think it's impressive. *Quite* impressive. But in real world scenarios I see it fail *all the time*, and everyone needs to stop pretending that this isn't happening.

Comment Re:McDonald's ice cream machines (Score 3, Informative) 66

This is entirely the issue. I work with a couple different franchisors (the parent company). Franchisees are locked in as part of the agreement.

I wouldn't call it fleecing (at least, not across the board). The idea is that in exchange for a business-in-a-box, you agree to follow certain guidelines, and we all make money because the system as a whole is proven to work. But the business itself is still yours, and the franchise agreement contract is only as strict as the franchisor wants to make it.

I've seen them deal with both sides of this issue. On the one hand, they've had to get after franchisees for swapping out approved products for cheaper stuff that messes with the brand. On the other, I've seen them explicitly approve the use of third party solutions for stuff that either 1) Doesn't matter in the long run, or 2) just makes the lives of the franchisees better.

At least with the ones I've dealt with, the goal is to make a great experience for the end client. But then again, I'm only talking about franchises with ~200 franchise locations. At that level, a lot of the people in the system are still essentially human.

Comment Pot, Meet Kettle (Score 2) 123

Corporations, who make money by carefully curating a viewpoint that's truthful, misleading, and which provides confirmation bias to their audience, are unhappy by a bunch of young bucks who provide a different set of true but misleading facts?

I am shocked! Shocked, I say!

Certainly, the distinction between more rigorous journalism and either selective aggregation or less rigorous work shouldn't be ignored, but all of this pales in comparison to the fact that every single news agency has their (whether written or unwritten) list of stories that they're not allowed to report on, because it doesn't align with the actual goal of making money.

Comment Re:how long before an death or major injury? (Score 2) 28

More importantly, what are the actual circumstances surrounding that accident when it happens? We attach too much weight to the fact that the accident occurred, and not enough to the events surrounding it.

I know it's an uncomfortable topic, and we obviously don't want to be glib about anything that endangers or harms a human being, but we also can't be so cautious that we never allow any scenarios where risks exist.

I commend them for this. It's a risk, and as a result, we're far more likely to get some interesting results out of it. It also starts addressing the human passenger aspect - how does the system fail when a stupid passenger does something stupid without a safety driver present?

Comment We'll See... (Score 1) 89

So, instead of an interpreted pseudo-query, now I have to deal with a search engine that thinks it can have a conversation with me? I don't want a single answer - I want to interpret the results myself (we're ignoring the fact that the search engine has already tried to do it's own relevance calculations).

Let's just have Eliza do it. "Please, tell me more about what's the weather tomorrow."

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