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MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information
- gAI 3y agoDid the AI Explain button replace a more reliable feature?
- cyanydeez 3y agoWith placebos, the correct question is: does it displace more efficacious procedures. I'd say yes. Even if something is a placebo, it's ability to displace better solutions is the problem
- gAI 3y agoI don't use MDN. I'm just asking if they removed something when they added this feature. Characterizing LLMs as placebos or "designed to produce gibberish" is inaccurate.
- tough 3y agoThey could for example only use LLM's to match query's and use as source for responses like many other -docs as AI- implementations do, wondering why Mozilla wouldn't do exactly the same. as Hallucinations are a normal occurance if not doing so.
- gAI 3y agoI agree it's an odd implementation and seems bandwagon-y in this context. Maybe it's the first step in a larger plan?
- cyanydeez 3y agoI compare them to placebos because they can be effective and they can have zero active ingredient.
- gAI 3y agoThat's a fairer comparison that I read it as. I'd say they're more like a pharmacy, usually dispensing medicine. But we don't really know how half the medicine works, and sometimes it hurts people.
- rideontime 3y agoWould you shop at such a pharmacy? I wouldn’t and I don’t.
- gAI 3y agoThat accurately describes all pharmacies. Medicine is hard.
- rideontime 3y agoOh, please. Have you never read the little insert that's packed in with all prescription medicine? Whether the mechanism is fully understood or not, it's at least been studied and demonstrated to have some benefit, and has _specific_ warnings about the ways it's been seen to harm people and how often. Unless you're referring to the scam-filled supplements aisle, in which case I agree wholeheartedly with your comparison.
- gAI 3y agoI was thinking more about SSRI's, which make up over half (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8450889/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8450889/) of US pharmacy orders. While we do know that they work for some people, they only work for 20% of people (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK361016/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK361016/). They also come with common side effects that can lower quality of life (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2719451/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2719451/). And we do not understand how they work in the first place (https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/how-antidepressants-work-is-a-mystery-scientists-still-dont-understand https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/how-antidepressants-...). Plenty of parallels with the common lamentations over generative AI.
- mike_hock 3y agoRelevant username.
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- soared 3y agoI don’t really understand viewpoints like these. The submitter knows the AI isn’t lying and the submitter is being purposefully obtuse in order to drive controversy.
- donmcronald 3y agoHallucinating, lying. What difference does it make when it's giving you an inaccurate, possibly made up explanation of an API?
- feoren 3y ago> The submitter knows the AI isn’t lying You've somehow internalized something as "obvious to everyone" that's actually very wrong and dangerous about AI. Of course the AI is lying. Or, perhaps a better term would be "bullshitting", defined as "sounding convincing while having no regard for the truth". By that definition, bullshitting is all LLMs ever do.
- gAI 3y agoThat's an ungenerous way of describing direct access to semantic space. gAI is creative. Rules-based AI is logical. We need them both.
- slotrans 3y agoIt may be "ungenerous" but it's accurate. Unlike the output of LLMs.
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- ImaCake 3y agoThis is a good point. The problem is that most people simply don’t care about these nuances. If the AI hallucinates or is wrong, then in their eyes it is lying. It doesn’t matter if that opinion is wrong because its still the opinion that matters.
- the-printer 3y agoThis is not a good look for what is the de facto go-to (from my perspective) reference guide for web development. I’m not too crazy about MDN, but I expected better from them.
- skilled 3y agoBut I thought it was supposed to be my Trusted Companion… That phrase had my eyes rolling
- sergiomattei 3y agoThis is a heavily editorialized title. It’s just a feature that explains a web platform doc using LLMs. They can be inaccurate sometimes, but as long as that’s clear to the end user (in this case, developers) I don’t think that’s a problem. Heck, many of us do this day-to-day with ChatGPT. In this case, the sin was not making the potential for inaccuracies clear enough.
- osullip 3y agoI cannot see anywhere that MDN say the explanation might be wrong.
- tough 3y agoIm pretty sure they use a vector storage database against their docs/resources so when you query they can just parse those sources and produce a free hallucination response to it. No need to make things up if you have the sources anyways.
- manquer 3y ago“Hallucination free” or “Free hallucination”? The latter would be very different interpretation and some here would probably agree with that accusation
- Ygg2 3y ago"Hallucination free"? No, no, no, it's "Hallucination? Free!!". https://youtu.be/5yuL6PcgSgM https://youtu.be/5yuL6PcgSgM
- missblit 3y agoThe linked bug report has four examples of it being wrong. And the bug reporter mentions there's no workflow to submit corrections. Also hallutination was probably the wrong word to use for LLMs being incorrect since it might imply they could be correct if they would only just focus on the right input data rather than, say, simply not understanding complex technical concents, but I guess that ship has sailed.
- geraldwhen 3y agoImagine putting an LLM anywhere health, safety, or regulation are involved. It would be engineering malpractice.
- adunsulag 3y agoSeeing a lot of it going on in healthcare right now, especially healthcare startups. Wonder how soon regulators will step in and start stomping down on it... it usually takes several years to a decade for any federal rule to be issued so startups may make it through long enough to turn the bag over to someone else.
- dsr_ 3y agoDon't worry: nobody would be incautious enough to hook a safety-critical system up to a general purpose computer, of all things.
- still_grokking 3y agoThat's not even funny. A lot of these systems are running actually on Windows, in version that aren't supported since years.
- readyplayernull 3y agoNow if only an AI could explain to me those intractable terms and contracts of BigCo's. /s
- AceJohnny2 3y agohttps://tosdr.org https://tosdr.org has existed for years before the current LLM wave
- kristopolous 3y agothat's pretty nice although I really don't like how it puts a value judgement on everything. Characterizing things in a way that's not just "good(-er) and bad(-er)" would be nice. For instance, on the "pornhub" one they put in red that the service can monitor your "private" messages. I can reverse the value of that: with the problems of sex trafficking, underage exploitation and other types of crime that could happen there, we should be happy the company is dedicated to doing that. All of those red items in fact look like things I've got no problem with there.
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- thesnide 3y agoThis just looks like the poster child of "hell is made of good intentions". It may look seemingly harmless at first, even a good idea. But you'll seed doubt. As that will erode the value of the whole site. Which was its main asset.
- samtho 3y agoGiven the clear nature of GPT to simply spew things that sound “right”, why is a technically proficient organization such as this one jumping headfirst into integrating this with their products where it is clear that is not yet up to this task?
- thorum 3y agoI actually think this feature would be fine if implemented better. GPT-4 is perfectly capable of accurately explaining what a short code block does if you prompt it with relevant documentation… which MDN has in abundance, but isn’t using, for some reason. The mistakes seem to be (1) using GPT 3.5 instead because it’s cost effective, even though GPT 3.5 has severe issues with hallucination, and (2) not including context from the surrounding article into the prompt. Also, since I assume MDN has a finite number of things that need explaining, why not let users mark an AI explanation as wrong, and submit their own corrected versions?
- contravariant 3y ago> Also, since I assume MDN has a finite number of things that need explaining, why not let users mark an AI explanation as wrong, and submit their own corrected versions? I mean if you implement it well you don't really need the model. If anything it would be more effective if it was always just slightly wrong.
- sadgfasfgiono 3y agoI can't imagine any situation where it would be acceptable. I have personally wasted hundreds of hours over the course of my career due to incorrect documentation. There are millions of programmers in the world. Incorrect documentation has surely caused hundreds of millions of hours of wasted labor, or tens of billions of dollars of economic damage. That's just the damage of wasted development time, not the harm buggy software causes users.
- acdha 3y agoFor me, the most obvious problem is that it’s often mixing wrong information in. I found a couple of very simple examples where it accurately explained things but anything longer tended to have multiple incorrect points On a deeper level, though, I don’t know that it’s actually useful. I haven’t found a single example where it added anything which wasn’t present in the authored text, and the explanations tend to be very pointless mechanical descriptions which miss the larger point of why you’d want to do things. On the popover API page, for example, it had a bunch of regurgitated comments before telling me that you’d need to write a bunch of JavaScript to actually toggle popover visibility when the whole point of that API is not needing to do that. That was also interesting with the incorrect claim that it was a non-standard attribute and you’d need to implement it using a JavaScript framework like Vue.js when you think about how much code someone might write if they relied on that explanation.
- drngdds 3y agoI can't wait for this fad of people trying to use LLMs for things that require factual accuracy goes away (or the tech actually gets there, I guess) Transformer models are capable of absurd sci-fi miracles when it comes to things that don't require truthfulness but this ain't it
- jancsika 3y agoI've never witnessed a github issue where the comments are unanimous like this one. So far there isn't a single naysayer. Could probably build fairly successful political party off of this once-in-a-lifetime momentum. :)
- JdeBP 3y agoOne came along some hours after you wrote that. Xyr reasoning was utterly foolish and dopey, and I'm not going to point xem out; merely observe that even there there wasn't unanimity. Interestingly, there are more negative comments on Hacker News than on the bug discussion. This probably tells something about the audiences of MDN bug commenters and Hacker News readers.
- brudgers 3y agoLLM’s solve all the problems with expert systems (remember those?) by removing expertise. This is not a criticism. General intelligence is not represented by the graybeard in the corner office. At best it’s a knucklehead in the next cubicle.
- joshka 3y ago@dang: Title is clickbait. Perhaps replace with something like: Bug report: MDN's AI Explain feature generates false explanations
- brickteacup 3y agonot really, it is in fact generating lies automatically
- Ukv 3y agoIMO "lying" implies intent, and "MDN" misses that it's specifically an LLM "AI help" assistant that most people won't yet be aware of. From the title I was thinking along the lines of MDN automatically swapping out an article on encryption to falsely claim a function doesn't exist depending on country to comply with local laws, for example.
- Ygg2 3y agoYou're right. It should be: "MDN LLM assistant generates bullshit to people seeking technical information".
- tailspin2019 3y agoThe HN guidelines are to use the title of the source article, which this does - and in this case it seems pretty accurate.
- joshka 3y ago> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. -- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- andrewfong 3y agoEven if the AI didn't make stuff up, it's unclear to me what value it adds over... - The existing human edited text already on the page - The playground to run the code in question - One of the many existing autocomplete / static analysis tools for HTML / CSS / JS out there. If you want a tooltip explaining what the second argument to a built in JS function in a code snippet does, this is a solved problem!
- netsharc 3y agoHey ChatGPT, please generate a Firefox Corp-style apology for this snafu... Be sure to use some bullshit blah blah for our original aim of wanting to enhance user experience and listening to the users' feedback, and some more bullshit blah blah about doing better in the future.
- Ygg2 3y agoWho owns MDN? I thought it was disbanded by Mozilla few years ago.
- Terry2006 3y agoThe team was disbanded a few years ago, which led to the creation of Open Web Docs (I think it is charity, the website: https://openwebdocs.org/ https://openwebdocs.org/ ) where several former editors are still maintaining MDN content. It looks like Mozilla has rebuilt a team of developers though and is trying to extract money from MDN (ads, AI, …), though they don't contribute significantly to the content nowaday.
- rapnie 3y agoIt is now maintained by this club, I think: https://openwebdocs.org https://openwebdocs.org
- msum 3y agoFWIW, OWD writes open source technical content and is not responsible for the design of MDN nor the blog, ads, or login and membership features of the site. That is done by Mozilla. The OWD team writes technical documentation on APIs, HTML, and JS. OWD also works on information architecture and browser compatibility data. They contribute mainly to https://github.com/mdn/content/ https://github.com/mdn/content/ and https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/ https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/. Mozilla, not OWD, is responsible for Yari, the platform behind MDN Web Docs (https://github.com/mdn/yari https://github.com/mdn/yari). The MDN blog, ads, AI and design, the MDN infrastructure, are fully owned and controlled by Mozilla. I know some folks who work on this content and TBH it’s the folks we’d want working on this content.
- robin_reala 3y agoMDN core maintainer confused, to revert: https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9208#issuecomment-1615411943 https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9208#issuecomment-1615411...
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