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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:Sad (Score 1) 28

CenturyLink customers can say goodbye to stable, reliable, uncapped cheap fiber Internet

If "Lumen" is the same as "Quantum", then since I was forced to drop my slow-but-rock-solid DSL for the quantum "upgrade" a year ago, it's been neither "stable"
  nor "reliable." (And a double fuck-you for blocking *INCOMING* 25. WTF is that all about?)

And the hits just keep on comin'

Comment Re:Still dual-booting? (Score 1) 65

> Since Ubuntu Server doesn't typically have any Wifi drivers baked in you need to (hope that you can) use your LAN port or otherwise sneakernet the required packages across

Not sure when the last time you tried it was, but I just did a 24.04 server install two weeks ago. I was expecting to have just that problem when I did the initial setup on my workbench (currently lacking a hardwire after an incident with the puppy), but it supported my USB wifi dongle OOTB.

Comment Re:Is Gabe the hero of prophesy? (Score 1) 53

Has Heroic made it possible to paste a password into the store login yet? Last time I tried it on my Deck, a couple months back, it was a non-starter, since I couldn't be arsed to transcribe the 32-character random string from Bitwarden on the on-screen keyboard.

There was a github issue open for a while, but it seemed to be being ignored.

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