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sigh people do talk about this, they complain about it non-stop. These same people probably aren't using it as intended, or are deliberately trying to farm a "gotcha" response. AI is a very neat tool which can do a lot of things well, but it's important to recognize its limitations. I don't use it for things I don't understand because I won't recognize if it's spitting out nonsense, but for topics I do understand it's hard to overstate how efficient and time saving it is.

I’m convinced people who can’t tell when a chat bot is hallucinating are also bad at telling whether something else they’re reading is true or not. What online are you reading that you’re not fact checking anyway? If you’re writing a report you don’t pull the first fact you find and call it good, you need to find a couple citations for it. If you’re writing code, you don’t just write the program and assume it’s correct, you test it. It’s just a tool and I think most people are coping because they’re bad at using it

I usually tell it "using only information found on applicationwebsite.com " that works pretty well at least to get me in the ballpark to find the answer I'm looking for.

in my use case, the hallucinations are a good thing. I write fiction, in a fictional setting that will probably never actually become a book. If i like what gpt makes up, I might keep it.

Usually, I'll have a conversation going into detail about a subject, this is me explaining the subject to gpt, then having gpt summarize everything it learned about the subject. I then plug that summary into my wiki of lore that nobody will ever see. Then move on to the next subject. Also gpt can identify potential connections between subjects that I didn't think about, and wouldn't have if it didn't hallucinate them.

Probably because they're not checking them

Because realistically, that time is zero.

They're trying not to lose money on the developments

Because in a lot of applications you can bypass hallucinations.

• getting sources for something
• as a jump off point for a topic
• to get a second opinion
• to help argue for r against your position on a topic
• get information in a specific format

In all these applications you can bypass hallucinations because either it's task is non-factual, or it's verifiable while promoting, or because you will be able to verify in any of the superseding tasks.

Just because it makes shit up sometimes doesn't mean it's useless. Like an idiot friend, you can still ask it for opinions or something and it will definitely start you off somewhere helpful.

I only use it for complex searches with results I can usually parse myself like ''list 30 typical household items without descriptions or explainations with no repeating items'' kind of thing.

Because most people are too lazy to bother with making sure the results are accurate when they sound plausible. They want to believe the hype, and lack critical thinking.

It's usually good for ecosystems with good and loads of docs. Whenever docs are scarce the results become shitty. To me it's mostly a more targeted search engine without the crap (for now)

In another thread, I was curious about the probability of reaching the age of 60 while living in the US.

Google gave me an assortment of links to people asking similar questions on Quora, and to some generic actuarial data, and to some totally unrelated bullshit.

ChatGPT gave me a multi-paragraph response referencing its data sources and providing both a general life expectancy and a specific answer broken out by gender. I asked ChatGPT how it reached this answer, and it proceeded to show its work. If I wanted to verify the work myself, ChatGPT gave me source material to cross-check and the calculations it used to find the answer. Google didn't even come close to answering the question, much less producing the data it used to reach the answer.

I'm as big an AI skeptic as anyone, but it can't be denied that generic search engines have degraded significantly. I feel like I'm using Alta Vista in the 90s whenever I query Google in the modern day. The AI systems do a marginally better job than old search engines were doing five years ago, before enshittification hit with full force.

It sucks that AI is better, but it IS better.

Remember when you had to have extremely niche knowledge of "banks" in a microcontroller to be able to use PWM on 2 pins with different frequencies?

Yes, I remember what a pile of shit it was to try and find out why xyz is not working while x and y and z work on their own. GPT usually gets me there after some tries. Not to mention how much faster most of the code is there, from A to Z, with only little to tweak to get it where I want (since I do not want to be hyper specific and/or it gets those details wrong anyway, as would a human without massive context).

Big businesses know, they even ask people like me to add extra measures in place. I like to call it the concorde effect. Youre trying to make a plane that can shove air out of the way faster than it wants to move, and this takes an enormous amount of energy that isn't worth the time save, or the cost. Even if you have higher airspeed when it works, if your plane doesn't make it to destination it isn't "faster".

We hear a lot about the downsides of AI, except that doesn't fit the big corpo narrative and people don't care enough really. If youre just a consumer who has no idea how this really works, the investments companiess make into shoving it everywhere makes it seem like it's not a problem and it looks like there's only AI hype and no party poopers.

What are you talking about? I don’t verify anything that ChatGPT gives me.

Gippity is pretty good at getting me 90% of the way there.

It usually sets me up with at least all the terms and etc I now know to google, whereas before I wouldnt even know what I am looking for in the first place.

Also not gonna lie, search engines are even worse than gippity for accuracy often.

And Ive had to fight with so many cases of garbage documentation lately that gippity genuinely does the job better, because it has all the random comments from issues and solutions in its data.

Usually once I have my sort of key terms I need to dig into, I can use youtube/google and get more specific information though, and thats the last 10%

You have to understand it well enough to know what stuff you can rely on. On the other hand nowadays there are often sources there, so it's easy to check.