That’s why I avoid them like the plague. I’ve even changed almost every platform I’m using to get away from the AI-pocalypse.
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BBC is probably salty the AI is able to insert the word Israel alongside a negative term in the headline
But every techbro on the planet told me it’s exactly what LLMs are good at. What the hell!? /s
Not only techbros though. Most of my friends are not into computers but they all think AI is magical and will change the whole world for the better. I always ask “how can a blackbox that throws up random crap and runs on the computers of big companies out of the country would change anything?” They don’t know what to say but they still believe something will happen and a program can magically become sentient. Sometimes they can be fucking dumb but I still love them.
the more you know what you are doing the less impressed you are by ai. calling people that trust ai idiots is not a good start to a conversation though
I just tried it on deepseek it did it fine and gave the source for everything it mentioned as well.
Do you mean you rigorously went through a hundred articles, asking DeepSeek to summarise them and then got relevant experts in the subject of the articles to rate the quality of answers? Could you tell us what percentage of the summaries that were found to introduce errors then? Literally 0?
Or do you mean that you tried having DeepSeek summarise a couple of articles, didn’t see anything obviously problematic, and figured it is doing fine? Replacing rigorous research and journalism by humans with a couple of quick AI prompts, which is the core of the issue that the article is getting at. Because if so, please reconsider how you evaluate (or trust others’ evaluations of) information tools which might help or help destroy democracy.
Now ask it whether Taiwan is a country.
That depends on if you ask the online app (which will cut you off or give you a CCP sanctioned answer) or run it locally (which seems to give a normal answer)
I learned that AI chat bots aren’t necessarily trustworthy in everything. In fact, if you aren’t taking their shit with a grain of salt, you’re doing something very wrong.
This is my personal take. As long as you’re careful and thoughtful whenever using them, they can be extremely useful.
Extremely?
News station finds that AI is unable to perform the job of a news station
🤔
You don’t say.
But the BBC is increasingly unable to accurately report the news, so this finding is no real surprise.
Why do you say that? I have had no reason to doubt their reporting
It’s a “how the mighty have fallen” kind of thing. They are well into the click-bait farm mentality now - have been for a while.
It’s present on the news sites, but far worse on things where they know they steer opinion and discourse. They used to ensure political parties has coverage inline with their support, but for like 10 years prior to Brexit, they gave Farage and his Jackasses hugely disproportionate coverage - like 20X more than their base. This was at a time when SNP were doing very well and were frequently seen less than the UK independence party. And I don’t recall a single instance of it being pointed out that 10 years of poor interactions with Europe may have been at least partially fuelled by Nidge being our MEP and never turning up. Hell we had veto rights and he was on the fisheries commission. All that shit about fisherman was a problem he made.
Current reporting is heavily spun and they definitely aren’t the worst in the world, but the are also definitely not the bastion of unbiased news I grew up with.
Until relatively recently you could see the deterioration by flipping to the world service, but that’s fallen into line now.
If you have the time to follow independent journalists the problem becomes clearer, if not, look at output from parody news sites - it’s telling that Private Eye and Newsthump manage the criticism that the BBC can’t seem to get too
Go look at the bylinetimes.com front page, grab a random story and compare coverage with the BBC. One of these is crowd funded reporters and the other a national news site with great funding and legal obligations to report in the public interest.
I don’t hate them, they just need to be better.
Look at their reporting of the Employment Tribunal for the nurse from Five who was sacked for abusing a doctor. They refused to correctly gender the doctor correctly in every article to a point where the lack of any pronoun other than the sacked transphobe referring to her with “him”. They also very much paint it like it is Dr Upton on trial and not Ms Peggie.
But AI is the wave of the future! The hot, NEW thing that everyone wants! ** furious jerking off motion **
Turns out, spitting out words when you don’t know what anything means or what “means” means is bad, mmmmkay.
It got journalists who were relevant experts in the subject of the article to rate the quality of answers from the AI assistants.
It found 51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form.
Additionally, 19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors, such as incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates.
Introduced factual errors
Yeah that’s . . . that’s bad. As in, not good. As in - it will never be good. With a lot of work and grinding it might be “okay enough” for some tasks some day. That’ll be another 200 Billion please.
that’s the core problem though, isn’t it. They are just predictive text machines, not understanding what they are saying. Yet we are treating them as if they were some amazing solution to all our problems
Well, “we” arent’ but there’s a hype machine in operation bigger than anything in history because a few tech bros think they’re going to rule the world.
I’ll be here begging for a miserable 1 million to invest in some freaking trains and bicycle paths. Thanks.
It found 51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form.
How good are the human answers? I mean, I expect that an AI’s error rate is currently higher than an “expert” in their field.
But I’d guess the AI is quite a bit better than, say, the average Republican.
I guess you don’t get the issue. You give the AI some text to summarize the key points. The AI gives you wrong info in a percentage of those summaries.
There’s no point in comparing this to a human, since this is usually something done for automation, that is, to work for a lot of people or a large quantity of articles. At best you can compare it to other automated summaries that existed before LLMs, which might not have all the info, but won’t make up random facts that aren’t in the article.
I’m more interested in the technology itself, rather than its current application.
I feel like I am watching a toddler taking her first steps; wondering what she will eventually accomplish in her lifetime. But the loudest voices aren’t cheering her on: they’re sitting in their recliners, smugly claiming she’s useless. She can’t even participate in a marathon, let alone compete with actual athletes!
Basically, the best AIs currently have college-level mastery of language, and the reasoning skills of children. They are already far more capable and productive than anti-vaxxers, or our current president.
It’s not the people that simply decided to hate on AI, it was the sensationalist media hyping it up so much to the point of scaring people: “it’ll take all your jobs”, or companies shoving it down our throats by putting it in every product even when it gets in the way of the actual functionality people want to use. Even my company “forces” us all to use X prompts every week as a sign of being “productive”. Literally every IT consultancy in my country has a ChatGPT wrapper that they’re trying to sell and they think they’re different because of it. The result couldn’t be different, when something gets too much exposure it also gets a lot of hate, especially when it is forced down on people.
alternatively: 49% had no significant issues and 81% had no factual errors, it’s not perfect but it’s cheap quick and easy.
Flip a coin every time you read an article whether you get quick and easy significant issues
If it doesn’t work then quick cheap and easy I’d pointless.
I’ll make you dinner every night for free but one night a week it will make you ill. Maybe a little maybe a lot.
It’s easy, it’s quick, and it’s free: pouring river water in your socks.
Fortunately, there are other possible criteria.
Do you dislike ai?
I don’t necessarily dislike “AI” but I reserve the right to be derisive about inappropriate use, which seems to be pretty much every use.
Using AI to find pertoglyphs in Peru was cool. Reviewing medical scans is pretty great. Everything else is shit.
I work in tech and can confirm the the vast majority of engineers “dislike ai” and are disillusioned with AI tools. Even ones that work on AI/ML tools. It’s fewer and fewer people the higher up the pay scale you go.
There isn’t a single complex coding problem an AI can solve. If you don’t understand something and it helps you write it I’ll close the MR and delete your code since it’s worthless. You have to understand what you write. I do not care if it works. You have to understand every line.
“But I use it just fine and I’m an…”
Then you’re not an engineer and you shouldn’t have a job. You lack the intelligence, dedication and knowledge needed to be one. You are detriment to your team and company.
That’s some weird gatekeeping. Why stop there? Whoever is using a linter is obviously too stupid to write clean code right off the bat. Syntax highlighting is for noobs.
I full-heartedly dislike people that think they need to define some arcane rules how a task is achieved instead of just looking at the output.
Accept that you probably already have merged code that was generated by AI and it’s totally fine as long as tests are passing and it fits the architecture.
“I can calculate powers with decimal values in the exponent and if you can not do that on paper but instead use these machines, your calculations are worthless and you are not an engineer”
You seem to fail to see that this new tool has unique strengths. As the other guy said, it is just like people ranting about Wikipedia. Absurd.
You can also just have an application designed to do that do it more accurately.
If you can’t do that you’re not an engineer. If you don’t recommend that you’re not an engineer.
Is it worse than the current system of editors making shitty click bait titles?
Surprisingly, yes
As always, never rely on llms for anything factual. They’re only good with things which have a massive acceptance for error, such as entertainment (eg rpgs)
I tried using it to spit ball ideas for my DMing. I was running a campaign set in a real life location known for a specific thing. Even if I told it to not include that thing, it would still shoe horn it in random spots. It quickly became absolutely useless once I didn’t need that thing included
Sorry for being vague, I just didn’t want to post my home town on here
You can say Space Needle. We get it.
The issue for RPGs is that they have such “small” context windows, and a big point of RPGs is that anything could be important, investigated, or just come up later
Although, similar to how deepseek uses two stages (“how would you solve this problem”, then “solve this problem following this train of thought”), you could have an input of recent conversations and a private/unseen “notebook” which is modified/appended to based on recent events, but that would need a whole new model to be done properly which likely wouldn’t be profitable short term, although I imagine the same infrastructure could be used for any LLM usage where fine details over a long period are more important than specific wording, including factual things
The problem is that the “train of the thought” is also hallucinations. It might make the model better with more compute but it’s diminishing rewards.
Rpg can use the llms because they’re not critical. If the llm spews out nonsense you don’t like, you just ask to redo, because it’s all subjective.
Or at least as an assistant on a field your an expert in. Love using it for boilerplate at work (tech).
Nonsense, I use it a ton for science and engineering, it saves me SO much time!
Do you blindly trust the output or is it just a convenience and you can spot when there’s something wrong? Because I really hope you don’t rely on it.
How could I blindly trust anything in this context?
Y’know, a lot of the hate against AI seems to mirror the hate against Wikipedia, search engines, the internet, and even computers in the past.
Do you just blindly believe whatever it tells you?
It’s not absolutely perfect, so it’s useless.
It’s all just garbage information!
This is terrible for jobs, society, and the environment!
You know what… now that you say it, it really is just like the anti-Wikipedia stuff.
In which case you probably aren’t saving time. Checking bullshit is usually harder and longer to just research shit yourself. Or should be, if you do due diligence
Its nice that you inform people that they cant tell if something is saving them time or not without knowing what their job is or how they are using a tool.
If they think AI is working for them then he can. If you think AI is an effective tool for any profession you are a clown. If my son’s preschool teacher used it to make a lesson plan she would be incompetent. If a plumber asked what kind of wrench he needed he would be kicked out of my house. If an engineer of one of my teams uses it to write code he gets fired.
AI “works” because you’re asking questions you don’t know and it’s just putting words together so they make sense without regard to accuracy. It’s a hard limit of “AI” that we’ve hit. It won’t get better in our lifetimes.
Idk guys. I think the headline is misleading. I had an AI chatbot summarize the article and it says AI chatbots are really, really good at summarizing articles. In fact it pinky promised.
Neither are my parents
What temperature and sampling settings? Which models?
I’ve noticed that the AI giants seem to be encouraging “AI ignorance,” as they just want you to use their stupid subscription app without questioning it, instead of understanding how the tools works under the hood. They also default to bad, cheap models.
I find my local thinking models (FuseAI, Arcee, or Deepseek 32B 5bpw at the moment) are quite good at summarization at a low temperature, which is not what these UIs default to, and I get to use better sampling algorithms than any of the corporate APis. Same with “affordable” flagship API models (like base Deepseek, not R1). But small Gemini/OpenAI API models are crap, especially with default sampling, and Gemini 2.0 in particular seems to have regressed.
My point is that LLMs as locally hosted tools you understand the mechanics/limitations of are neat, but how corporations present them as magic cloud oracles is like everything wrong with tech enshittification and crypto-bro type hype in one package.
I have been pretty impressed by Gemini 2.0 Flash.
Its slightly worse than the very best on the benchmarks I have seen, but is pretty much instant and incredibly cheap. Maybe a loss leader?
Anyways, which model of the commercial ones do you consider to be good?
benchmarks
Benchmarks are so gamed, even Chatbot Arena is kinda iffy. TBH you have to test them with your prompts yourself.
Honestly I am getting incredible/creative responses from Deepseek R1, the hype is real, though its frequently overloaded. Tencent’s API is a bit under-rated. If llama 3.3 70B is smart enough for you, Cerebras API is super fast.
Qwen Max is… not bad? The reasoning models kinda spoiled me, but I think they have more reasoning releases coming.
MiniMax is ok for long context, but I still tend to lean on Gemini for this.
I dunno about Claude these days, as its just so expensive. I haven’t touched OpenAI in a long time.
Oh, and sometimes “weird” finetunes you can find on OpenRouter or whatever will serve niches much better than “big” API models.
EDIT:
Locally, I used to hop around, but now I pretty much always run a Qwen 32B finetune. Either coder, Arcee Distill, FuseAI, R1, EVA-Gutenberg, or Openbuddy, usually.
So there is not any trustworthy benchmarks I can currently use to evaluate? That in combination with my personal anecdotes is how I have been evaluating them.
I was pretty impressed with Deepseek R1. I used their app, but not for anything sensitive.
I don’t like that OpenAI defaults to a model I can’t pick. I have to select it each time, even when I use a special URL it will change after the first request
I am having a hard time deciding which models to use besides a random mix between o3-mini-high, o1, Sonnet 3.5 and Gemini 2 Flash
Heh, only obscure ones that they can’t game, and only if they fit your use case. One example is the ones in EQ bench: https://eqbench.com/
…And again, the best mix of models depends on your use case.
I can suggest using something like Open Web UI with APIs instead of native apps. It gives you a lot more control, more powerful tooling to work with, and the ability to easily select and switch between models.
They were actually really vague about the details. The paper itself says they used GPT-4o for ChatGPT, but apparently they didnt even note what versions of the other models were used.
I’ve found Gemini overwhelmingly terrible at pretty much everything, it responds more like a 7b model running on a home pc or a model from two years ago than a medium commercial model in how it completely ignores what you ask it and just latches on to keywords… It’s almost like they’ve played with their tokenisation or trained it exclusively for providing tech support where it links you to an irrelevant article or something
Gemini 1.5 used to be the best long context model around, by far.
Gemini Flash Thinking from earlier this year was very good for its speed/price, but it regressed a ton.
Gemini 1.5 Pro is literally better than the new 2.0 Pro in some of my tests, especially long-context ones. I dunno what happened there, but yes, they probably overtuned it or something.
Bing/chatgpt is just as bad. It loves to tell you it’s doing something and then just ignores you completely.
I don’t think giving the temperature knob to end users is the answer.
Turning it to max for max correctness and low creativity won’t work in an intuitive way.
Sure, turning it down from the balanced middle value will make it more “creative” and unexpected, and this is useful for idea generation, etc. But a knob that goes from “good” to “sort of off the rails, but in a good way” isn’t a great user experience for most people.
Most people understand this stuff as intended to be intelligent. Correct. Etc. Or they At least understand that’s the goal. Once you give them a knob to adjust the “intelligence level,” you’ll have more pushback on these things not meeting their goals. “I clearly had it in factual/correct/intelligent mode. Not creativity mode. I don’t understand why it left out these facts and invented a back story to this small thing mentioned…”
Not everyone is an engineer. Temp is an obtuse thing.
But you do have a point about presenting these as cloud genies that will do spectacular things for you. This is not a great way to be executing this as a product.
I loathe how these things are advertised by Apple, Google and Microsoft.
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Temperature isn’t even “creativity” per say, it’s more a band-aid to patch looping and dryness in long responses.
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Lower temperature is much better with modern sampling algorithms, E.G., MinP, DRY, maybe dynamic temperature like mirostat and such. Ideally, structure output, too. Unfortunately, corporate APIs usually don’t offer this.
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It can be mitigated with finetuning against looping/repetition/slop, but most models are the opposite, massively overtuning on their own output which “inbreeds” the model.
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And yes, domain specific queries are best. Basically the user needs separate prompt boxes for coding, summaries, creative suggestions and such each with their own tuned settings (and ideally tuned models). You are right, this is a much better idea than offering a temperature knob to the user, but… most UIs don’t even do this for some reason?
What I am getting at is this is not a problem companies seem interested in solving.They want to treat the users as idiots without the attention span to even categorize their question.
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This is really a non-issue, as the LLM itself should have no problem at setting a reasonable value itself. User wants a summary? Obviously maximum factual. He wants gaming ideas? Etc.
For local LLMs, this is an issue because it breaks your prompt cache and slows things down, without a specific tiny model to “categorize” text… which few have really worked on.
I don’t think the corporate APIs or UIs even do this. You are not wrong, but it’s just not done for some reason.
It could be that the trainers don’t realize its an issue. For instance, “0.5-0.7” is the recommended range for Deepseek R1, but I find much lower or slightly higher is far better, depending on the category and other sampling parameters.
Rare that people here argument for LLMs like that here, usually it is the same kind of “uga suga, AI bad, did not already solve world hunger”.
Your comment would be acceptable if AI was not advertised as solving all our problems, like world hunger.
So the ads are the problem? Do you have a link to such an ad?
Not ads, whole governments talking about it and funding that crap like Altman/Musk in the USA or Macron in Europe.
What a nuanced representation of the position, I just feel trustworthiness oozes out of the screen.
In case you’re using random words generation machine to summarise this comment for you, it was a sarcasm, and I meant the opposite.So many arguments… Wow!
Ask a forest burning machine to read the surrounding treads for you, then you will find the arguments you’re looking for. You have at least 80% chance it will produce something coherent, and unknown chance of there being something correct, but hey, reading is hard amirite?
Lemmy is understandably sympathetic to self-hosted AI, but I get chewed out or even banned literally anywhere else.
In one fandom (the Avatar fandom), there used to be enthusiasm for a “community enhancement” of the original show since the official DVD/Blu-ray looks awful. Years later in a new thread, I don’t even mention the word “AI,” just the idea of restoration, and I got bombed and threadlocked for the mere tangential implication.
