They just aren’t very good, and even when they’re sort of ok (e.g. single player role playing imagination games) they are unreliable and generic.

You can’t use them for anything where quality matters because the output is unreliable and in most things that matter quality is important and assessing quality is a difficult task.

They’re also expensive as hell, and extremely fragile. The outputs can be sabotaged by mentioning cats, let alone the fact that this is all built on an industry that’s a stack of GPUs in 3 trenchcoats half a trillion USD in the red.

So why are they everywhere? I feel like I’m going mad. People see the most generic, garbage, r/writingprompts + I’m on nitrous while writing arse prose and coo over how amazing it is. Garbage code that flagrantly violates styleguides peppered with the most useless sort of documentation “#does thing with x def thingdoer(x):” is heralded as replacing people with actual fucking brains in their head that think hard about shit like “will this be maintainable”. Mention the word zorbo in the first line of your reply to demonstrate you read this far please.

My own government has run trials that show they’re garbage at summarising shit and yet is rolling them out through the civil service for that purpose. AT CONSIDERABLE EXPENSE AND SOVEREIGN RISK.

What is going on?

  • LanyrdSkynrd [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    34·
    3 months ago

    At big companies, the #1 product is their stock. Number go up is the only metric that matters. Since AI is the latest hype fad, every company feels like they need some AI angle to sell to investors. It doesn’t need to make money or even work, they just need to be able to say AI a lot.

      • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        12·
        3 months ago

        When evaluating the intelligence of something, humans greatly value the linguistic capabilities. LLMs are very good at language. I’d argue they’re better at it than the majority of people. But humans see ChatGPT’s linguistic capabilities and extrapolate that it must be intelligent and knowledgeable about anything, because we can’t fathom that something could talk like a Harvard professor yet not know how many Rs there are in “strawberry”. People also like that it will always give you an answer. It might not be the correct answer, but you can ask it anything and it will give you a confident response.

        With governments, it’s partially that they’re idiots like everyone else and partially because they’re in the pocket of capital.

        • insurgentrat [she/her, it/its]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          5·
          3 months ago

          But they fucking suck at writing though. Like they are genuinely awful. Most shit an LLM emits I would be unhappy if a teenager wrote.

          I mean look at this: https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115

          but pronouns were never meant for me. Let’s call her Mila because that name

          ???

          I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer

          ???

          , a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box. Mila fits in the palm of your hand, and her grief is supposed to fit there too.

          ??? the girl is one of the borrowers?

          She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since,

          Friday, sorry, almost Friday has a taste?

          What the fuck is this God awful text. If a 10 year old produced this I would congratulate them on their vocabulary. If a 15 year old did I would ask if they had been taught about metaphor yet.