I was trying to look up the quote from Phineas and Ferb, but Bing’s Copilot did something even funnier

Further proof about how much of bullshit generators these things are.

I mean, it clearly is regurgitating something, but does not understand the semantic context at all

These LLMs are so trained to spit out a confident answer that logic is irrelevant, as long as something is said

It’s kind of like how politicians very rarely answer “I don’t know” to questions, because to not give an answer is a sign of weakness

@yassie_j I love this answer from Copilot! We still have to be very critical about what tools like Copilot are feeding us, but this hasn't changed from all the other tools we have used in the past. Copilot is mostly just an extension to the Bing search results. We still, and always, have to be very critical about anything that we read or hear online. Or anywhere else really. I personally use Copilot on a daily basis today, but it's always with this in mind.
@kaspernymand sorry, you love this answer??? It tried to console me about something that is impossible and not only that, but it gave me an incorrect answer — the actual search results were what I wanted. Copilot was actually more than useless, it actually had negative usability here because it provided an answer that makes no sense. I don’t need a computer to console me, I need a computer to give me the answer I need.
@yassie_j I saw it more as a joke. Everybody knows that you can't be born without your parents being involved. Errors like these, I just see as the funny reality of a tool still being in its early phases of development. Or perhaps it was indeed meant as a joke from Copilot. Nobody knows. You know, it's just like a grandma missing the point of a sentence and answering something completely unrelated. It happens. We just have to laugh about it and move on.

@kaspernymand if everybody knows this, then why doesn’t copilot? If we’re supposed to rely on these things to provide appropriate answers, then most people would rather expect an answer rather than a joke, wouldn’t they? If I wanted to look for jokes, I would go to a comedy club, with real humans, instead of a computer.

Do you see the limitation here? I wanted an answer to a question, and the answer was already provided in the search results below this stupid chatbox. The Copilot would not have made any of the results any better. This has negative utility because it wasted my time.

@yassie_j @kaspernymand that's where i'm at on this. there's a finite amount of space on the screen; any subdivision of that space can be graded against its usefulness to the objective of the interface. the purpose of a web search is to enable me to find information. if we grade the presence of a nondeterministic text generator against this stated objective, it would score very low. and as it turns out, these features are allotted a significant portion of the limited resource of screen space. they are objectively a complete waste