this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
677 points (97.6% liked)

Programmer Humor

32558 readers
561 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

edit: fixed thumbnail

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Because AI doesn't actually know anything, it just says words hoping that it makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Well… it’s a correct phone number. So that kind of undercuts your message.

edit: I’m actually a bit baffled by people downvoting this. That is the correct number given by both of those organizations. It isn’t some LLM hallucination.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

thats like saying theyre wrong because words are spelled correctly yes the number is correct but the machine doesnt know what the hell it is, or what it's for, or in any sense "understand" what it's regurgitating to the user as evidenced by the fact that it listed it twice. "AI" doesn't know anything, it just copy-pastes shit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

First, it just copy pastes much in the same way animals do; a neural network with outputs weighted by experience. Secondly it posted it twice because both of those organizations are real and are references for the topic it mistakenly meant to reply about. The same way of asking what to do when a house burns one might reply:

  • Contact x city fire department. 911
  • Contact y county fire and rescue. 911

Third, and most importantly, I’m not saying it invalidates the message completely… but it does undercut it. As in, there would have been a much stronger case for just randomly outputting garbage information that it hopes sounds correct if the information had not been, you know… correct.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

meanwhile i asked it to write a short simple hello world in a scripting language designed for children, and it spat out nothing but garbage. one of us is leaning on confirmation bias.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I’m curious which language and which model, because I have had several of the models write programs like the sieve of Eratosthenes quite successfully. You can find this report in my GitHub of the same name.

I don’t know what bias you’re on about. I was just reporting that those phone numbers are in fact the correct numbers given by those organizations. Are you implying they aren’t? Because, you might want to go to the primary source and check for yourself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

you're saying that AI has hopes