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It's easy to bring down the hammer of scope insensitivity by vividly describing a single person's struggle. The question is how AI affects error rates.
by red75prime 2mo ago
It's easy to bring down the hammer of scope insensitivity by vividly describing a single person's struggle. The question is how AI affects error rates.
- cwillu 2mo agoThe question is how AI affects error rates and error recovery rates! My experience dealing with ai-mediated processes is that the error recovery paths often simply don't exist, presumably because eliminating the personel that dealt with oddball and errors was the supposed benefit of having the AI deal with it in the first place.
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo agoYeah, but also, if we can make AI do the same work cheaper than doctors, we can probably reduce the wages of doctors and save a bunch of money, which will both increase profits for health companies and reduce costs for patients. At some point, sufficient savings is better for patients than more doctors.
- UpsideDownRide 2mo agoYou mean increase the profits AND increase the costs....
- inigyou 2mo agoWhy would costs for patients decrease
- tdeck 2mo agoThis response always comes up but I think it's not the whole story and gives "AI" a pass. If I report a bug in (for example) Slack that loses messages and cost me a lot of time and headaches, is it an appropriate response to say "but Teams has even more bugs" or "sure, but if you had that conversation face to face you might miss something too"?
- vidarh 2mo agoIt's not about giving AI a free pass - obviously we should try to remove these errors. It's about whether one reasonable option for removing these errors is to stop using AI or not. If AI increases error rates that would be a reasonable option. If AI doesn't increase the error rates, or even reduces them, it might not be. And hence comparing AI use to a fictional situation where no errors happens is not meaningful. I've personally caught multiple errors that were not just transcription errors, but elementary reasoning errors done by specialists I've seen - the baseline error rate from healthcare providers is far above zero.
- red75prime 2mo agoThe article doesn't meet a bug report standard. How would you feel about a bug report that doesn't mention which software were used, which versions were used, but it extensively describes all the harms that were caused by the lost messages. I treat it as it is: a trendy hit piece against AI. There's nothing like "Why they still use Whisper Large V2?" in sight. If this article pushes the establishment to be more transparent about the AI tools, good. But right now there's not much to discuss.
- tdeck 2mo agoThere are numerous news articles about software or hardware issues that get discussed on HN and don't meet the criteria for a bug report. But it's only the "AI" related ones that elicit this type of response.
- red75prime 2mo agoI reacted to a specific claim about a specific article. I don't have a statistical summary of all articles (even an intuitive one). You seem to have such a summary. Do AI-unrelated articles cause "we need to react to this urgently, like it were a bug report" too? Maybe that's why you don't see answers like mine.
- energy123 2mo agoNot error rates which implicitly assumes all errors are of equal consequence, something like 1/N*∑(magnitude of consequences of error) * (did error occur)