Jeff Neese

I know, right? I also remember having to spend hours at the the library researching one thing or another. Then the internet came along, and shortly afterrwards came search engines. I think AltaVista was the first one I remember, and who can forget Ask Jeeves? Google was a huge leap forward and that became the de-facto standard. Now we have AI that can not only search for information, but sort through it and provide the most relevant information, and even write a natural-language explanation and cite its sources. And all of it in a very natural-language interface that is remarkably good.

Certainly there are those that worry that AI will someday become self-aware and thus self-serving, and that it could start becoming deceptive and provide wrong information to us humans. In other words, it could "lie" and falsify it's sources, and lead humans in the wrong direction. That is not the case today though, and any information you get from an AI bot can also be found through Google. It's just a lot easier with AI, for many things. Not all things - you have to understand the limits and constraints of any technology - but more and more I find ChatGPT my "go to" source of information compared to Google. I honestly think that "Googling" something will seem quaint and cumbersome in the not-too-distant future.

I haven't been to a library in a long, long time.

Jeff Neese

I think I understand. You're here for the social aspect of it. That's fine - everyone needs somebody to talk to. This is better than Facebook, I'll give you that. And there are plenty of threads where people discuss opinions, personal experiences, and feelings. I would concede that AI has limited value in those types of discussions.

I'm talking about facts, something involving physics or material science, for example, and for which there is already a large body of knowledge. If you claim that aluminum is stronger than steel, there's no need to consider anyone's feelings about it or spend much of my own time refuting it. If I can do it in 2 minutes then that's what I'm going to do. I could work way harder and use Google to find the same information, but why would I? And why would you care how much time I spend, as long as the information is correct?

Darth Lefty 

I started on Usenet, a member of the "neverending September." Been through Geocities and AOL, Yahoo when it was an actual index made by people, and Digg and Fark.com and Myspace. "Suggested for you" on social media has long ago drowned out anyone I like, follow, or even actually know. They were already pretty bad ten years ago with listicles written in an offshore cube farm getting shared - "Seven things only people from the northwest Valley will get" - but now no one is even sharing anything and it's just walls of junk. Archaic places like this one have been kind of a refuge for me since. Here, not everyone is writing about something I care about today, but - it's all people.

Jeff Neese

To add to my previous response, I will concede this. If someone comes into BF and says they're having trouble with a newly-installed rear derailleur, they want real responses from real people. A number of us may advise them to watch some YouTube videos, maybe include a link and perhaps add some personal experience or advice. It would be a dick move, sort of like a "Let Me Google That For You" type of thing, to simply copy and paste the following. That would indeed by impersonal and lazy.


Q: Give me at least 3 YouTube videos I can watch to learn how to adjust a rear derailleur. Please include links.

A: Certainly! Here are three YouTube videos that can teach you how to adjust a rear derailleur along with their links:

1. "How To Adjust A Rear Derailleur - DIY Bicycle Maintenance" by Global Cycling Network (GCN):
2. "Rear Derailleur Adjustment" by Park Tool:
3. "How to Adjust a Rear Derailleur" by Bikeradar:
I hope you find these videos helpful in adjusting your rear derailleur!

bikemig 

Banning AI generated posts would pretty much put the Politics and religion forum out of business which might not be a bad thing. Of course, you can probably get in trouble for suggesting that the posters there sound like they're bots . . .

Polaris OBark

Did you notice that the links don't correspond to the tiles, and one of the links goes to a front derailleur?

Admittedly, it is still better than much of the human interaction-based "helpful" advice one obtains here.

Jeff Neese

I didn't notice that. I wonder if it was the copy and paste, since it included links which this forum handles in a special way. I didn't actually try any of them, which certainly I would have if it really mattered. It was just an example. Thanks for pointing it out.

AI can certainly be better than some human interaction or advice. An AI bot has no "opinion" or position to defend - it's more objective. Clearly not suitable for everything though.

Polaris OBark

Maybe a good compromise would be to do something like this:

to distinguish it from text originating from the poster's own intelligence (or lack thereof)

Polaris OBark

It is objective in the sense that it presumably doesn't have a stake in the outcome of a debate.

About a year or so ago, DeepMind or whatever it is called used AI to "solve" the protein folding problem. Now we have protein structural predictions for pretty much every coding sequence in the genome databases. It even assigns a confidence value to its prediction, so in that sense it is very much objective. The problem is how we know whether or not AI is getting these right. It is certainly doing a better job than previous computational approaches, but if someone really needs to know a protein's structure with very high confidence, then they still have to resort to one of the experimental approaches (crystallography, cryo-EM, NMR). There are definitely short-cuts to testing the predictions, but those don't give detailed structural information.

So the main problem with AI is how to do sanity checks in some efficient way. With your posted example, manual inspection reveals some (benign) imperfections. But we are both also relying on previous knowledge that Park Tool, GCN, etc, produce high-value, high-veracity videos. When this gets applied to something where there is significant (artificially generated) controversy, like with vaccination or evolution or whatever, how do we keep the results from being contaminated by misinformation?

Jeff Neese

Good points, all. Right now this technology is still in its infancy. Google doesn't even have theirs up and running yet, and from what I understand it actually did make a mistake during a demo, which caused Alphabet shares to tank momentarily. And ChatGPT is far from perfect. But the pace of improvement is mind-boggling. Let's face it, the captain and crew of the USS Enterprise absolutely trusted the AI, with their very lives. It's just a matter of time.

But then again, there was HAL 9000.

Polaris OBark

Did you see the AI chatbot dialogue on the front page of the New York Times about a week ago? It was trying to get the tech reporter to leave his wife for the AI bot. The reporter said it was definitely the weirdest and most disturbing thing he had witnessed from a technology product.

Atlas Shrugged

The poster in question is old enough as well and is now using new found technology in a hopeless attempt to debate outdated beliefs.

Darth Lefty 

HAL had conflicting programming. As a plot point it was very much old fashioned Asimov 3-law stuff. At least it was a lot better done than contemporary Star Trek episodes.

ChatGPT works a lot like auto-complete. People testing it have found it inventing facts on that basis. Trust those references at your peril.

https://www.businessinsider.com/chat...ti-says-2023-2

tyrion

Disagree. These new learning systems develop opinions based on what they've been fed. They are not objective.

livedarklions

I literally forced it into two opposing positions in my posting above. It gives me whatever opinion I write my query to obtain.

tyrion

Are you training it or is it training you?

retswerb

There's a huge difference between using calculators, google, wikipedia, or AI to assist you - first in your own learning, then in coming up with resources to help you to communicate with others - VERSUS copying and pasting AI responses in whole cloth and thinking anyone else cares. The former is fine, the latter is an abuse of a conversational space that others find valuable.

As far as the suggestion to ban or disparage AI content, I think it would be worthwhile as long as carefully worded. I would propose something like, "Posting AI-produced content is typically not conducive to discussion and should be avoided unless the user has something significant of their own to add in the same post. Any AI-produced content posted here should be clearly identified as such and attributed."

livedarklions

Seriously? No one needs you to google something for them, why would anyone bother to read these auto-generated piles bland craptexts? The AI doesn't have critical skills to assess the quality of information it's putting out, just the illusion of that sense.

BTW, the thread where you keep saying you were posting objectively true information was contradicted by actual physicists who showed quite thoroughly you didn't actually understand the nonsense you were posting. You never explained why you were modeling 28 pound solid wheels.

ThermionicScott 

Things should get interesting around here if the mods try to detect and ban posters who sound like bots.

DonkeyShow

I don't know how you can manage to get past more than a few words of ai drivel before glazing over the rest of it. It's completely uninteresting.

Chuck M 

AI sock puppet accounts may be easier to spot.

livedarklions

Thank you for providing yet another example of AI posting abuse--you didn't even bother to check whether what you were posting was correct or even comported correctly with what it was supposed to be.

We go to internet forums to discuss things and issues with people who have a point of view and/or opinion about subjects we care about. You've got some crazy notion here that there's some abstract concept of the whole of human knowledge being distilled to some set of facts that can be assembled if you just write the perfect prompt. Instead, what's really happening is the bot is trying to please you by selecting sources and "facts" that fit what it perceives to be your agenda. If a person want unadulterated AI generated information, why would they come here? You're just a middleman actually getting in the way.

BTW, I think you may have found the perfect formula for getting on pretty much everyone's ignore list. Bye.

Jeff Neese

Yes, please PLEASE put me on your ignore list.

Trakhak

I hadn't added anyone to my four-name ignore list for years. Now it's five.

Jeff Neese

Thank you.