4 ms·

> Call me when it stops making things up. We haven’t moved past this yet

by dwroberts 3mo ago

AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
I’m unaware of any humans that don’t have this error method also.
- ofjcihen 3mo ago
  This argument style is always humorous. The intention is something like “so humans are as bad as AI” when the original question boils down to something like “why would I replace humans with AI?”.
  - AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
    The entire purpose of automation is to remove a capacity limited human from a continuous workflow because the workflow is more capably achieved with fewer errors than the human See: traffic lights
    - ofjcihen 3mo ago
      That’s a great explanation of automation. If I have a choice between a deterministic traffic light and a non-deterministic traffic light which one would I use? And yes, before you say “this isn’t a comparison of non deterministic and deterministic tools, this is a comparison of two non-deterministic tools” think about what my next question might be.
      - anuramat 3mo ago
        > think about what my next question might be or you could just say it yourself instead
    - overgard 3mo ago
      An AI traffic light sounds like an excellent way to kill a lot of people
  - Ukv 3mo ago
    > The intention is something like “so humans are as bad as AI” when the original question boils down to something like “why would I replace humans with AI?” If AI really is at human level quality/error rate (I don't think it is for general tasks, but there are some areas where it is), then the answer is typically cost and speed/capacity.
    - ofjcihen 3mo ago
      Have outputs from engineers traditionally been measured in cost and speed? Remember, we aren’t just talking about the product you create. While you would measure deliverables by cost and speed are we ignoring something else? Something that could potentially be more important than either of those metrics?
      - Ukv 3mo ago
        > Have outputs from engineers traditionally been measured in cost and speed? Yes. How long it'll take and how much it'll cost are going to be among pretty much any customer's first questions. They're not the only considerations, and could potentially be outweighed by other concerns even when quality is the same, but I think they are the main drives of AI adoption in industry. If error rate is the same, a $1/hr (amortized) camera and machine vision model capable of checking 300ft of material for defects per minute will likely be preferred to a $10/hr human QA capable of checking 30ft per minute, for instance.
        ofjcihen 3mo ago
        Oh machine learning has been useful for measuring deterministic and non deterministic outputs for a long time. But that’s not the argument here, is it? So the question still stands.
        Ukv 3mo ago
        My understanding of your argument is (paraphrasing): > > People try to excuse AI issues/failure modes by saying humans have them too, but even if they're equally bad then what would be the whole point of replacing a human worker with AI? To which my response is that speed and cost are also important factors, which can often give AI the edge in considerations when quality/error rate is equal. If you meant something other than that, you may have to specify.
  - sph 3mo ago
    We must give this fallacy a name. It’s the facile way out of the argument used by boosters whenever one dares to criticize LLMs.
- whateveracct 3mo ago
  ? in a professional setting, my coworkers are just randomly gonna make stuff up
  - AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
    That is the entire industry of business consulting. Boston consulting group Bain and MacKenzie make billions of years completely making shit up. same thing with Ernst and young and any of these organizations that make these “future of (insert market)” reports
    - whateveracct 3mo ago
      right, so none of my human coworkers ever
    - Diogenesian 3mo ago
      Again, they never made up totally fictional citations or any otherwise immediately falsifiable statements. In fact it is the opposite problem: technically these reports are quite clean and up to finest MBA standards. The BS is ideological / methodological / social / delusionally optimistic strategizing, and so on. This BS involves the most powerful and haziest forms of human cognition. Consultants "making stuff up" really is not the same thing as a frontier SOTA LLM being unable to summarize a document without making up a few numbers.
- Diogenesian 3mo ago
  I am unaware of any healthy human who confabulates things as arbitrarily and disastrously as a SOTA reasoning model. It is childish to say stuff like "lawyers always made up court cases" - no they didn't!
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- zero-sharp 3mo ago
  Look, I don't spend most of my time online criticizing AI progress. But what does your response even mean? People hallucinating work and solutions isn't commonplace at all, right? What industry do you work in where people hallucinate with frequency?
  - snozolli 3mo ago
    I can't speak to GP's intention, but I've personally witnessed a guy on my team who was trying to position himself as the go-to technical dude. He was jockeying for a management role. When QA or customer support had questions about our products, he'd always have an answer. I would say that at least 50% of the time, his answer was completely fabricated nonsense. He'd wildly misrepresent projects that his teammates were working on. I also saw several incidents of cargo-cult programming from him. Bizarrely, this never bit him in the ass and now he's a middle manager at a FAANG. This experience leaves me without much hope for the future of software development as a career.
jrflo 3mo ago
To be fair I think we'd be able to claim AGI is here if that problem is solved. At this point the models are so smart they're borderline super intelligent if they were cognizant of hallucinations and their own shortcomings. If GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.8 could tell you "I don't know" they'd certainly be "smarter" than any individual human. Some specialists might be better in niche domains, but I don't know of any humans who are experts at that level in every field.
- OtomotO 3mo ago
  Your condition is called AI psychosis. Good news is: it's curable!
  - jrflo 3mo ago
    Care to elaborate? What is AI psychosis? How am I exhibiting it? I thought hacker news was the last place free of mindless dunking on the internet, I guess I was wrong. If you'd like to engage in a debate on the original topic of this thread I'd be more than happy to, but if you want to dunk, twitter is over at x.com now.
    - senordevnyc 3mo ago
      Much of HN has devolved into Yahoo Answers levels of inane buffoonery, sadly. Especially when it comes to screeching about how AI is so terrible, blah blah. So tiresome.
      - OtomotO 3mo ago
        I feel the same about the endless hype, so I guess it's in the eye of the beholder
        senordevnyc 3mo ago
        How could it not be?
inigyou 3mo ago
This! It got a much wider pool of templates to copy from, so now if you ask for a 3D web game it gives you a similarly boring game using three.js instead of failing entirely. It still has no imagination and still makes up nonsense all the time. The fundamental problems haven't improved.

> Call me when it stops making things up. We haven’t moved past this yet

AndrewKemendo 3mo ago

I’m unaware of any humans that don’t have this error method also.

ofjcihen 3mo ago
This argument style is always humorous. The intention is something like “so humans are as bad as AI” when the original question boils down to something like “why would I replace humans with AI?”.
- AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
  The entire purpose of automation is to remove a capacity limited human from a continuous workflow because the workflow is more capably achieved with fewer errors than the human See: traffic lights
  - ofjcihen 3mo ago
    That’s a great explanation of automation. If I have a choice between a deterministic traffic light and a non-deterministic traffic light which one would I use? And yes, before you say “this isn’t a comparison of non deterministic and deterministic tools, this is a comparison of two non-deterministic tools” think about what my next question might be.
    - anuramat 3mo ago
      > think about what my next question might be or you could just say it yourself instead
  - overgard 3mo ago
    An AI traffic light sounds like an excellent way to kill a lot of people
- Ukv 3mo ago
  > The intention is something like “so humans are as bad as AI” when the original question boils down to something like “why would I replace humans with AI?” If AI really is at human level quality/error rate (I don't think it is for general tasks, but there are some areas where it is), then the answer is typically cost and speed/capacity.
  - ofjcihen 3mo ago
    Have outputs from engineers traditionally been measured in cost and speed? Remember, we aren’t just talking about the product you create. While you would measure deliverables by cost and speed are we ignoring something else? Something that could potentially be more important than either of those metrics?
    - Ukv 3mo ago
      > Have outputs from engineers traditionally been measured in cost and speed? Yes. How long it'll take and how much it'll cost are going to be among pretty much any customer's first questions. They're not the only considerations, and could potentially be outweighed by other concerns even when quality is the same, but I think they are the main drives of AI adoption in industry. If error rate is the same, a $1/hr (amortized) camera and machine vision model capable of checking 300ft of material for defects per minute will likely be preferred to a $10/hr human QA capable of checking 30ft per minute, for instance.
      - ofjcihen 3mo ago
        Oh machine learning has been useful for measuring deterministic and non deterministic outputs for a long time. But that’s not the argument here, is it? So the question still stands.
        Ukv 3mo ago
        My understanding of your argument is (paraphrasing): > > People try to excuse AI issues/failure modes by saying humans have them too, but even if they're equally bad then what would be the whole point of replacing a human worker with AI? To which my response is that speed and cost are also important factors, which can often give AI the edge in considerations when quality/error rate is equal. If you meant something other than that, you may have to specify.
- sph 3mo ago
  We must give this fallacy a name. It’s the facile way out of the argument used by boosters whenever one dares to criticize LLMs.
whateveracct 3mo ago
? in a professional setting, my coworkers are just randomly gonna make stuff up
- AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
  That is the entire industry of business consulting. Boston consulting group Bain and MacKenzie make billions of years completely making shit up. same thing with Ernst and young and any of these organizations that make these “future of (insert market)” reports
  - whateveracct 3mo ago
    right, so none of my human coworkers ever
  - Diogenesian 3mo ago
    Again, they never made up totally fictional citations or any otherwise immediately falsifiable statements. In fact it is the opposite problem: technically these reports are quite clean and up to finest MBA standards. The BS is ideological / methodological / social / delusionally optimistic strategizing, and so on. This BS involves the most powerful and haziest forms of human cognition. Consultants "making stuff up" really is not the same thing as a frontier SOTA LLM being unable to summarize a document without making up a few numbers.
Diogenesian 3mo ago
I am unaware of any healthy human who confabulates things as arbitrarily and disastrously as a SOTA reasoning model. It is childish to say stuff like "lawyers always made up court cases" - no they didn't!
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
zero-sharp 3mo ago
Look, I don't spend most of my time online criticizing AI progress. But what does your response even mean? People hallucinating work and solutions isn't commonplace at all, right? What industry do you work in where people hallucinate with frequency?
- snozolli 3mo ago
  I can't speak to GP's intention, but I've personally witnessed a guy on my team who was trying to position himself as the go-to technical dude. He was jockeying for a management role. When QA or customer support had questions about our products, he'd always have an answer. I would say that at least 50% of the time, his answer was completely fabricated nonsense. He'd wildly misrepresent projects that his teammates were working on. I also saw several incidents of cargo-cult programming from him. Bizarrely, this never bit him in the ass and now he's a middle manager at a FAANG. This experience leaves me without much hope for the future of software development as a career.

jrflo 3mo ago

To be fair I think we'd be able to claim AGI is here if that problem is solved. At this point the models are so smart they're borderline super intelligent if they were cognizant of hallucinations and their own shortcomings. If GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.8 could tell you "I don't know" they'd certainly be "smarter" than any individual human. Some specialists might be better in niche domains, but I don't know of any humans who are experts at that level in every field.

OtomotO 3mo ago
Your condition is called AI psychosis. Good news is: it's curable!
- jrflo 3mo ago
  Care to elaborate? What is AI psychosis? How am I exhibiting it? I thought hacker news was the last place free of mindless dunking on the internet, I guess I was wrong. If you'd like to engage in a debate on the original topic of this thread I'd be more than happy to, but if you want to dunk, twitter is over at x.com now.
  - senordevnyc 3mo ago
    Much of HN has devolved into Yahoo Answers levels of inane buffoonery, sadly. Especially when it comes to screeching about how AI is so terrible, blah blah. So tiresome.
    - OtomotO 3mo ago
      I feel the same about the endless hype, so I guess it's in the eye of the beholder
      - senordevnyc 3mo ago
        How could it not be?

inigyou 3mo ago

This! It got a much wider pool of templates to copy from, so now if you ask for a 3D web game it gives you a similarly boring game using three.js instead of failing entirely. It still has no imagination and still makes up nonsense all the time. The fundamental problems haven't improved.