[ben_w]

> The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though

Not sure about books. Between self-help, religion, and New Age, I'd guess quite a lot of books not marked as fiction are making false claims.

[bootsmann]

Thats not what I meant tho, the point about books is that they store information reliably. If I write something down, within most reasonable settings it will still be the same text when I read it back. That means if I write something down instead of remembering it, the writing will outperform me in storing this information. Same with the calculator, the calculator will always perform at least as good as me at arithmetics. There is no calculation on which the calculator can randomly fail, leading me to do it by hand, so I don't need to retain the skill of doing it by hand. The same can not be said about LLMs and that is the issue.

[ben_w]

Sure, but also that's not what (generative) AI are for.

If you want reliable list of facts, use (or tell the AI to use) a search engine and a file system… just then you need whatever system you use to be able to tell if your search for "Jesus" was in the Christian missionary sense, or the "ICE arrested Jesús Cruz" sense, or you wanted the poem in the Whitehouse v Lemon case, or if you were just swearing.

If you can't tell which you wanted, the books being constant doesn't help.

> There is no calculation on which the calculator can randomly fail, leading me to do it by hand, so I don't need to retain the skill of doing it by hand.

I've seen it happen, e.g. on my phone the other week, because Apple's note-based calculator strips unrecognised symbols, which means when you copy-paste from a place where "." is the decimal separator, while your system settings say you use "," as a decimal separator, it gives an answer off by some power of ten… but I've also just today discovered that doing this the other way around on macOS (system setting "." as separator) it strips the stuff before the decimal.

Just in case my writing is unclear, here's a specific example, *with the exact same note* (as in, it's auto-shared by iCloud and recomputing the answer locally) on macOS (where "." is my separator):

  123,45 / 2 ‎ = 22.5
  123.45 / 2 ‎ = 61.725

and iOS (","):

  123,45 / 2 ‎ = 61,725
  123.45 / 2 ‎ = 6.172,5

And that's without data entry failure. I've had to explain to a cashier that if I have three items that are each less than £1, the total cannot possibly be more than £3.