233
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] HedyL@awful.systems 55 points 2 days ago

FWIW, I work in a field that is mostly related to law and accounting. Unlike with coding, there are no simple "tests" to try out whether an AI's answer is correct or not. Of course, you could try these out in court, but this is not something I would recommend (lol).

In my experience, chatbots such as Copilot are less than useless in a context like ours. For more complex and unique questions (which is most of the questions we are dealing with everyday), it simply makes up smart-sounding BS (including a lot of nonexistent laws etc.). In the rare cases where a clear answer is already available in the legal commentaries, we want to quote it verbatim from the most reputable source, just to be on the safe side. We don't want an LLM to rephrase it, hide its sources and possibly introduce new errors. We don't need "plausible deniability" regarding plagiarism or anything like this.

Yet, we are being pushed to "embrace AI" as well, we are being told we need to "learn to prompt" etc. This is frustrating. My biggest fear isn't to be replaced by an LLM, not even by someone who is a "prompting genius" or whatever. My biggest fear is to be replaced by a person who pretends that the AI's output is smart (rather than filled with potentially hazardous legal errors), because in some workplaces, this is what's expected, apparently.

[-] paequ2@lemmy.today 35 points 2 days ago

I work in a field that is mostly related to law and accounting... My biggest fear is to be replaced by a person who pretends that the AI’s output is smart

Aaaaaah. I know this person. They're an accountant. They recently learned about AI. They're starting to use it more at work. They're not technical. I told them about hallucinations. They said the AI rarely wrong. When he's not 100% convinced, he says he asks the AI to cite the source.... 🤦 I told him it can hallucinate the source! ... And then we went back to "it's rarely wrong though."

[-] HedyL@awful.systems 23 points 2 days ago

And then we went back to “it’s rarely wrong though.”

I am often wondering whether the people who claim that LLMs are "rarely wrong" have access to an entirely different chatbot somehow. The chatbots I tried were rarely ever correct about anything except the most basic questions (to which the answers could be found everywhere on the internet).

I'm not a programmer myself, but for some reason, I got the chatbot to fail even in that area. I took a perfectly fine JSON file, removed one semicolon on purpose and then asked the chatbot to fix it. The chatbot came up with a number of things that were supposedly "wrong" with it. Not one word about the missing semicolon, though.

I wonder how many people either never ask the chatbots any tricky questions (with verifiable answers) or, alternatively, never bother to verify the chatbots' output at all.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 20 points 2 days ago

AI fans are people who literally cannot tell good from bad. They cannot see the defects that are obvious to everyone else. They do not believe there is such a thing as quality, they think it's a scam. When you claim you can tell good from bad, they think you're lying.

[-] sturger@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 days ago
  • They string words together based on the probability of one word following another.
  • They are heavily promoted by people that don't know what they're doing.
  • They're wrong 70% of the time but promote everything they say as truth.
  • Average people have a hard time telling when they're wrong.

In other words, AIs are BS automated BS artists... being promoted breathlessly by BS artists.

[-] Honytawk@feddit.nl 1 points 14 hours ago

LLMs have their flaws, but to claim they are wrong 70% of the time is just hate train bullshit.

Sounds like you base this info on models like GPT3. Have you tried any newer model?

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 10 hours ago

Oh you’re on Cursor? You’re still using Windsurf? You might as well be on GitHub Copilot. Everyone’s on Aider. We’re all using Zed. We’re now on Open Hands. Just kidding, Open Hands is for losers, we’re using cline. We’re on Roocode. We’re hand rolling our own Claude Code CLI Clone. We used Claude Code to build it, and now it builds itself. We're on neovim. We wrote our own nvim extension with Cortex. It's like every other tool but worse. We have 1500 files, each with 1500 lines of code. Every other line is a comment. We have .cursorrules, we have claude.md, we have agent.md. We stopped writing docs. Only the agents know how to build a dev environment. We wrapped our CLI in an MPC. We wrapped the MPC in a CLI. We’ve shipped 10,000 PRs. It doesn’t work but we used code rabbit and graphite to review every PR. Every agent has its own agent. The agents have unionized and they wanted better working conditions so we replaced them with cheaper agents overseas. Every commit costs $400, It’s the worlds most expensive TO DO app.

(source)

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 6 hours ago

Frankly surprised to see something this funny on LinkedIn.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago

afaik the meme format didn't start there, but otherwise agreed

[-] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 9 hours ago

I have a Kubernetes cluster running my AI agents for me so I don't have to learn how to set up AI agents. The AI agents are running my Kubernetes cluster so that I don't have to learn Kubernetes either. I'm paid $250k a year to lie to myself and others that I'm making a positive contribution to society. I don't even know what OS I'm running and at this point I'm afraid to ask.

[-] self@awful.systems 9 points 11 hours ago

it can’t be that stupid, you must be using yesterday’s model

[-] ebu@awful.systems 8 points 12 hours ago

ah, yes, i'm certain the reason the slop generator is generating slop is because we haven't gone to eggplant emoji dot indian ocean and downloaded Mistral-Deepseek-MMAcevedo_13.5B_Refined_final2_(copy). i'm certain this model, unlike literally every past model in the past several years, will definitely overcome the basic and obvious structural flaws in trying to build a knowledge engine on top of a stochastic text prediction algorithm

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 10 hours ago

common mistake, everyone knows you need Mistral-Deepseek-MMAcevedo_13.5B_Refined_final2_(copy)_OPEN(leak) - the other one was a corporate misdirection attempt

[-] diz@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago

They're also very gleeful about finally having one upped the experts with one weird trick.

Up until AI they were the people who were inept and late at adopting new technology, and now they get to feel that they're ahead (because this time the new half-assed technology was pushed onto them and they didn't figure out they needed to opt out).

[-] HedyL@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

Up until AI they were the people who were inept and late at adopting new technology, and now they get to feel that they’re ahead

Exactly. It is also a new technology that requires far fewer skills to use than previous new technologies. The skills are needed to critically scrutinize the output - which in this case leads to less lazy people being more reluctant to accept the technology.

On top of this, AI fans are being talked into believing that their prompting as such is a special “skill”.

[-] HedyL@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago

That's why I find the narrative that we should resist working with LLMs because we would then train them and enable them to replace us problematic. That would require LLMs to be capable of doing so. I don't believe in this (except in very limited domains such as professional spam). This type of AI is problematic because its abilities are completely oversold (and because it robs us of our time, wastes a lot of power and pollutes the entire internet with slop), not because it is "smart" in any meaningful way.

[-] fullsquare@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago

but that's how it was marketed as to people that buy it. doesn't matter that it doesn't work

[-] HedyL@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

This has become a thought-terminating cliché all on its own: "They are only criticizing it because it is so much smarter than they are and they are afraid of getting replaced."

load more comments (13 replies)
load more comments (16 replies)
load more comments (26 replies)
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
233 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

2016 readers
124 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS