[lproven]

I am mystified.

The page is not long, the text is not complex. The message is obvious and it is contained in the title as shown here on HN.

The first pic and its caption make it plain.

The next group of 4 pics and their SINGLE SENTENCE caption spell it out clearly.

As for "almost the whole article" -- it is short! It took about 90sec to read the whole page, top to bottom.

"AI" chat bots can't count. This is well known. It is the stuff of memes.

https://osu.ppy.sh/community/forums/topics/1770930?n=1

[scbrg]

> As for "almost the whole article" -- it is short! It took about 90sec to read the whole page, top to bottom.

Cool. The article has 2348 words, so that's around 26 words per second, or ~1560 words per minute.

According to some speed reading pages I randomly found via Google the consensus seems to be that 1000+ words per minute is quite exceptional. https://irisreading.com/what-is-the-average-reading-speed/ puts average adult reading speed at around 300 WPM, which you casually exceed by 400%.

Far be it from me to suggest that your estimate is inaccurate, but at least know that not everybody reads at that speed :-)

[lproven]

Yeah, I am a speedreader, and I did used to be able to do circa 3000wpm at a push. Good to know that even as a myopic 55YO I can still do half that without trying.

Points of comparison: I originally read Hal Clement's classic Mission of Gravity in about 25min, and Joseph Conrad's Victory in about 3 hours.

[karlshea]

Did you forget you’re a speed reader when asserting how long it should take to read the whole article?

[lproven]

No. I expect people to be able to skim.

If the can't skim, for example if they are a foreign language speaker of low-intermediate ability (as I am in 5 or 6 languages, and I am also a professional language teacher among other things), then I expect them to know that they can't skim, and make appropriate allowances.

[scbrg]

Right, so your 90 seconds is actually closer to 10 minutes for most people. That's a lot of time to communicate "AI tends to render one banana as two bananas", which was OP's point.

Yes, there were pictures that communicated the same thing, but people naively thought that those 2348 words may actually hold some additional information, as otherwise ca 2300 of them would be completely superfluous. But they were wrong; again, OP's point. Not sure what's so mystifying by this.

[lproven]

I don't think that the time difference is that big. I'm fast, but I don't think I'm that much faster than an average skim reader.

As I said, the title of the article and a couple of image captions are enough to get the gist, and as such, I find it baffling that so many people seem to have totally failed to understand it.

[foobarbecue]

My point exactly. This article could have been written: "AI is biased against drawing just one banana" and I would have preferred it. And I said "almost" because I skimmed two of the paragraphs in the middle that seemed unlikely to contain information.

[lproven]

But that isn't the point.

The point is, LLMs look smart but they are not, and an easily-verifiable data point is that they can't count.

[foobarbecue]

Ah, right, and that's not obvious to some people... I guess I'm just not the target audience.