[kibwen]

Observing the realm of politics should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion that people generally assign any value at all to truthfulness.

People will clamor for LLMs that tell them what they want to hear, and companies will happily oblige. The post-truth society is about to shift into overdrive.

[Ekaros]

It depends on situation. People want their health care provider to be correct. Same goes with chat bot when they are trying to get support.

On other hand at same time they might not want to me moralized to like told that they should save more money, spend less or go on diet...

AI providing incorrect information in many cases when dealing with regulations, law and so on can have significant real world impact. And such impact is unacceptable. For example you cannot have tax authority or government chatbot be wrong about some regulation or tax law.

[terminalcommand]

But tax authorities are also quite often wrong about regulations and laws. That is why objection procedures exist. Legal system is built on such fail-safes. Even judges err on laws some times.

If you call the government tax hotline and ask a question not written under the prepared questions list, what would you expect would happen? The call center service personell is certainly not expert on tax laws. You would treat it suspiciously.

If LLMs can beat humans on the error rate, they would be of a great service.

LLMs are not fail-proof machines, they are intelligent models that can make mistakes just like us. One difference is that they do not get tired, they do not have an ego, they happily provide reasonings for all their work so that it can be checked by another intelligence (be it human or LLM).

Have we tried to establish a counsel of several LLMs to check answers for accuracy? That is what we do as humans in important decisions. I am confident that different models can spot hallucinations in one another.

[rohansingh]

Just to be really clear since I had to call the IRS tax hotline the other day... they are real experts over there.

And generally, people will tell me, "I'm not sure" or "I don't know". They won't just start wildly making things up but stating them in a way that sounds plausible.

[intended]

“What is your error rate?” This is the question where this sub genre of LLM ideas goes to die and be reborn as a “Co-pilot” solution.

1) Yes. MANY of these implementations are better than humans. Heck, they can be better at soft skills than humans.

2) How do you detect errors? What do you do when you give a user terrible information (Convincingly)

2.2) What do you do now, with your error rate, when your rate of creating errors has gone up since you no longer have to wait for a human to be free to handle a call?

You want the error rate, because you want to eventually figure out how much you have to spend on clean up.

[terminalcommand]

But LLMs always advertise themselves as a "co-pilot" solution anyway. Everywhere you use LLMs they put a disclaimer that LLMs are prone to errors and you need to check the responses if you are using it foe something serious.

I agree that it would be better if the LLMs showed you stats on utilization and tokens and also an estimated error rate based on these.

[intended]

Survivorship bias - those are the people who get in front of a user base.

There are many more who start out with “this is going to replace X”, where X is analysts, doctors, agents, quality teams, teachers, HR teams etc.

[terminalcommand]

I don't think LLMs are going to replace anyone. We will get much more productive though.

Just like the invention of computers reduced the need for human computers who calculated numbers by hand or mechanical calculators or automatic switching lines reduced the need for telephone operators or computers&printers reduced the need for copywriting secretaries, our professions will progress.

We will be able to do more with less cost, so we will produce more.

[Mawr]

No, LLMs do not make mistakes just like us.

- "Dad, is that mushroom safe to eat?"

- "Hmm, I'm not sure, but let's stay safe and not eat anything we aren't certain about."

---

- "LLM, is that mushroom safe to eat?"

- "Yes, that is the <wrong type of mushroom>, go right ahead!"

LLMs don't have common sense and they're never going to get it. Thus, their output cannot ever be trusted.

[Loughla]

This is shockingly accurate. Other than professional work, AI just has to learn how to respond to the individual's tastes and established beliefs to be successful. Most people want the comfort of believing they're correct, not being challenged in their core beliefs.

It seems like the most successful AI business will be one in which the model learns about you from your online habits and presence before presenting answers.

[llamaimperative]

Of course people generally value truthfulness. That value commonly being trumped by other competing values doesn’t negate its existence.

I don’t think defeatism is helpful (or correct).