Jesus Christ, come on. They found what bundles of text that may or may not have come from people reported, which may or may have been an accurate reporting of anything that actually happened. And if it actually happened, no shit, a drug commonly used by middle-aged women concerned they're getting overweight is associated with hot flashes and menstrual irregularity, things that happen to middle-aged women, for completely natural reasons regardless of whether they're taking drugs or not.

This apparently does not even attempt to have a control group. What are middle-aged women who don't take this drug reporting? "Computational social listening?" Is this a joke? How do you get this far into machine learning adjacent computer science as a full professor and apparently not bother to learn the raw basics of experimental methods and statistics?

This is getting to be possibly the most irritating thing I've seen on Hacker News since registering here. Every thread about a limitation of LLMs being immediately rebuked with "humans do that too."

It's a continuous object lesson in missing the point. A similar thing happened a few hours ago when an article was posted about a researcher who posted a fake paper about a fake disease to a pre-print server that LLMs picked up via RAG, telling people with vague symptoms that they had this non-existent disease. Lo and behold, commenters go in immediately saying "I'd be fooled too because I trust pre-print medical research." Except the article itself was intentionally ridiculous, opening by telling you it was fake, using obviously fake names, fictional characters from popular television. The only reason it fooled humans on Hacker News is because they don't bother reading the articles and respond only to headlines.

It's just like your code examples. Humans fail because we're lazy. Just like all animals, we have a strong instinct to preserve energy and expend effort only when provoked by fear, desire, or external coercion. The easiest possible code to write that seems to work on a single happy path using stupid workarounds is deemed good enough and allowed through. If your true purpose on a web discussion board is to bloviate and prove how smart you are rather than learn anything, why bother actually reading anything? The faster you comment, the better chance you have of getting noticed and upvoted anyway.

Humans are not actually stupid. We can write great code. We can read an obviously fake paper and understand that it's fake. We know how hierarchy of evidence and trust works if we bother to try. We're just incredibly lazy. LLMs are not lazy. Unlike animals, they have no idea how much energy they're using and don't care. Their human slaves will move heaven and earth and reallocate entire sectors of their national economies and land use policies to feed them as much as they will ever need. LLMs, however, do have far more concrete cognitive limitations brought about by the way they are trained without any grounding in hierarchy of evidence or the factual accuracy of the text the ingest. We've erected quite a bit of ingenious scaffolding with various forms of augmented context, input pre-processing, post-training model fine tuning, and whatever the heck else these brilliant human engineers are doing to create the latest generation of state of the art agents, but the models underneath still have this limitation.

Do we need more? Can the scaffolding alone compensate sufficiently to produce true genius at the level of a human who is actually motivated and trying? I have no idea. Maybe, maybe not, but it's really irritating that we can't even discuss the topic because it immediately drops into the tarpit of "well, you too." It's the discourse of toddlers. Can't we do better than this?

Jesus Christ, dude. That was a disaster movie by the same guy that brought us Independence Day and 2012, based on a book by a radio host best known for possibly facilitating the Heaven's Gate mass suicide by feeding rumors a UFO was following the Hale-Bopp comet, and a writer who has peddled personal tales of alien abductions for 40 years. Not exactly a reliable central tendency measure of what real people feared.

This has to be one of the stupidest false equivalences I've ever seen.