Fuck AI

Why are LLMs so wrong most of the time? Aren’t they processing high quality data from multiple sources?

Well that's the thing. LLMs don't generally "process" data as humans would. They don't understand the text they're generating. So they can't check their answers against reality.

(Except for Grok 4, but it's apparently checking its answers to make sure they agree with Elon Musk's Tweets, which is kind of the opposite of accuracy.)

I just don’t understand the point of even making these softwares if all they can do is sound smart while being wrong.

As someone who lived through the dotcom boom of the 2000s, and the crypto booms of 2017 and 2021, the AI boom is pretty obviously yet another fad. The point is to make money - from both consumers and investors - and AI is the new buzzword to bring those dollars in.

I almost always get perfect responses, but I'm very limited in what I'll input. Often I'm just using ChatGPT to remember a word or event I've forgotten. Pretty much 100% accurate on that bit.

Couldn't explain how I know what will and won't work, but I have a sense of it. Also, the farther you drill into a thing, the more off-topic it gets. I'm almost always one and done with a prompt.

Aren’t they processing high quality data from multiple sources?

Here's where the misunderstanding comes in, I think. And it's not the high quality data or the multiple sources. It's the "processing" part.

It's a natural human assumption to imagine that a thinking machine with access to a huge repository of data would have little trouble providing useful and correct answers. But the mistake here is in treating these things as thinking machines.

That's understandable. A multi-billion dollar propaganda machine has been set up to sell you that lie.

In reality, LLMs are word prediction machines. They try to predict the words that would likely follow other words. They're really quite good at it. The underlying technology is extremely impressive, allowing them to approximate human conversation in a way that is quite uncanny.

But what you have to grasp is that you're not interacting with something that thinks. There isn't even an attempt to approximate a mind. Rather, what you have is a confabulation engine; a machine for producing plausible fictions. It does this by creating unbelievably huge matrices of words - literally operating in billions of dimensions at once, graphs with many times more axes than we have letters - and probabilistically associating them with each other. It's all very clever, but what it produces is 100% fake, made up, totally invented.

Now, because of the training data they've been fed, those made up answers will, depending on the question, sometimes ends up being right. For certain types of question they can actually be right quite a lot of the time. For other types of question, almost never. But the point is, they're only ever right by accident. The "AI" is always, always constructing a fiction. That fiction just sometimes aligns with reality.

I like to think of them as artificial con men. They sound great. They have confidence and are complimentary and are very agreeable, but they will tell you what they think you want to hear. Whether or not what they are telling you is truthful isn't even part of the equation.

The first time I ever used it I got a bugged response. I asked it to give me a short summary of the 2022 Super Bowl, and it told me Patrick Mahomes won the Super Bowl with a field goal kick.

Now, those two things separately are true. Mahomes won. The game was won on a field goal.

The LLM just looks at the probability that the sentences it's generating are correct based on its training data, and it smashed two correct statements together thinking that was the most probable reasonable response.

It does that a lot. Don't use GenAI without checking its output.

Much of the Input Comedy from the Web now, not the web 2003.

I've used it a few times to quickly check some reference values, calculations and symptoms (research/physiology) and most of the time its fine but occasionally it spits out some of the craziest shit i've ever seen, like dangerously wrong but its just as confident.