Oh FFS @[email protected] @[email protected] "readers also pointed out a handful of concrete cases where an incorrect answer was rendered. This feedback is enormously helpful, and the MDN team is now investigating these bug reports"

They aren't "bugs" - #LLMs by definition just put together plausible sounding words with no regard to correctness. Pointing out individual errors demonstrates this, but does not provide any mechanism by which it might be "fixed" in the general case

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/mdn/responsibly-empowering-developers-with-ai-on-mdn/

It also says "even extraordinarily well-trained LLMs — like humans — will sometimes be wrong"

which is true as far as it goes, but here's the thing: They are not *wrong like humans* … yes, you'll find some overconfident bullshitters on stack overflow, but generally humans in these contexts have some awareness of the limits of their knowledge and don't drift seamlessly between accurate explanation and complete BS

More on the #Gizmodo #AI debacle: After publishing error-ridden #LLM garbage which their own editorial team called "fucking dogshit" 'a G/O Media spokesman, said the company would be “derelict” if it did not experiment with AI. “We think the AI trial has been successful,”'

(free link)

https://wapo.st/43iHlmP

Good to see mainstream press finally touching the question of whether #LLM #AI BSing is fixable or an inherent property of the tech, even if it gets a bit of he said, she said treatment.

Also uh "Those errors are not a huge problem for the marketing firms turning to Jasper AI for help writing pitches…" marketing doesn't care if their pitches are BS? KNOCK ME OVER WITH A FEATHER

https://fortune.com/2023/08/01/can-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-be-fixed-experts-doubt-altman-openai/

Complete gibberish will likely get weeded out. Common knowledge will tend to be overwhelmed by other sources. So the sweet spot for influence would seem to be obscure topics, or unique tokens that only appear in your content (though to what end isn't obvious).

Bring on the SolidGoldMagikarp https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ya9LzwEbfaAMY8ABo/solidgoldmagikarp-ii-technical-details-and-more-recent

"It's highly unlikely that ChatGPT's training data includes the entire text of each book under question, though the data may include references to discussions about the book's content—if the book is famous enough"
Highlights a pernicious problem with ChatGPT style #LLM #AI: It's far more likely to give reasonable answers on well-known subjects. If you spot check with say, Dickens and Hunter S. Thomson, you might think it was pretty good at spotting naughty books

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/an-iowa-school-district-is-using-chatgpt-to-decide-which-books-to-ban/

But for more obscure ones, it's probably no better than a coin toss. Being relatively good at stuff "everyone knows" gives people false confidence that it's also good at stuff they don't know

(we should also note that even if the entire text of the books were in the training set, that wouldn't mean it would provide accurate answers about the content!)

G/O Media management continue their #AI enshitification of #Gizmodo, laying off staff of Spanish language site and switching to "AI" translation of English content

They know people who want shitty machine translations of the English content can already get that with Chrome or google translate, right?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/ai-took-my-job-literally-gizmodo-fires-spanish-staff-amid-switch-to-ai-translator/

Type II #AI (https://twitter.com/reedmideke/status/1137496639856189440) spotted in the wild "One of the sources said workers at one point produced the 3D design wholecloth themselves without the help of machine learning at all"

https://www.404media.co/kaedim-ai-startup-2d-to-3d-used-cheap-human-labor/

#OpenAI, on their flagship product "Additionally, ChatGPT has no 'knowledge' of what content could be AI-generated. It will sometimes make up responses to questions like 'did you write this [essay]?' or 'could this have been written by AI?' These responses are random and have no basis in fact."

Nominally this refers only to using #ChatGPT as an #AI detector. Extrapolating to other topics is left as an exercise to the reader ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/openai-admits-that-ai-writing-detectors-dont-work/

Anyway, maybe I just forgot about that job at Microsoft, surely Microsoft's own AI knows who has worked there and what they did right?

[narrator: It did not]
Citations:
1 "his LinkedIn profile" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/project/project-management-software
2 "Azure Data Factory" (youtube ms project tutorial)
3 "Azure Synapse Analytics" (my twitter profile)
4 "Azure Databricks" https://theskillsfactory.com/
5 "Azure SQL Database" (youtube playlist of office tutorials)
6 his GitHub profile https://theskillsfactory.com/2022/04/02/faststone-image-viewer-free-photo-editor/

What if we call it out on the bad citations?

[narrator: Nothing good, except a promotion to Senior Software Engineer]

The "Reed Mideke - Senior Software Engineer - Microsoft | LinkedIn" link goes to this tweet https://twitter.com/reedmideke/status/1552795438771671040
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Another good illustration of how #LLM #AI just absolutely bullshits when doesn't have real info to go on. If I had an active linkedin, it seems likely it could have linked it and got my education and employment somewhat right. Of course, if I had a more common name, it would likely have just picked up someone else's.

I still don't get how multiple leading tech companies think a search engine that randomly injects bullshit is product people want 🥴

Well, good news. Bing doesn't think I've been convicted of crimes. More good news, it invented a cool back story. Possibly bad news, it accused me of snitching on the mob

Full disclosure: While my path to a career in programming was perhaps precocious and unusual, to the best of my recollection I was not providing computer support to La Cosa Nostra gambling operations in the mid 80s, nor did I (again, to the best of my recollection) testify in a mob trial while in elementary school

Also, never (to the best of my recollection) wrote disk imaging software for the IRS or contributed (patent infringing or otherwise) code to Mono.

Links for U.S. v SALERNO (https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/481/739) and U.S. v Ganias (https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-128/united-states-v-ganias/) appear to be real and at least vaguely related to Bing's summaries