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by ffsm8 87 days ago
You're seriously overestimating the average person's ability to understand what llms are.

Look at all the influences, streamers, podcasters constantly asking em things and taking it as fact - live.

Isn't the joe Rogan experience like the most watched podcast or something? Every episode I've ever stumbled upon he "fact checks" multiple things via their sponsor which is just an llm provider specialized on news.

People aren't good at statistics. If something is close enough to the truth enough times, and talks authoritively on everything with good English... Guess what, they're gonna trust it.
1 comments
andrewflnr 87 days ago
You don't need to know how an LLM works to realize "sometimes the magic ChatGPT box tells me wrong things". Even if you fully fall for the anthropomorphism, this only requires the same level of awareness as realizing that after the third or fourth thing your weird uncle tells you that turns out not to be true, maybe you shouldn't take him at his word.
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ben_w 87 days ago
If human psychology worked like that, lotteries wouldn't be a thing. Nor prayer. There wouldn't be horoscopes in newspapers, nor homeopathy.

One of the various oddities going on with LLMs in particular is them being trained with feedback from users having a chance to upvote or downvote responses, or A/B test which of two is "better". This naturally leads to things which are more convincing, though this only loosely correlates to "more correct".

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andrewflnr 87 days ago
No shit. Why do people in this thread keep telling me that people are stupid like that's a news flash to me? The fact remains that it is stupid, and especially for educated people like the laywers/doctors/etc mentioned upthread, it's sufficiently obvious stupidity that there's no excuse. Yes, I know, that describes a lot of other stupidity. Much of our history as a species is inexcusable.

Edit: though I should be clear: people demonstrably do often learn to discount obviously unreliable sources. Not all the time, but pretty often in the easily verifiable cases, especially where they don't have a major emotional stake.

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