Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by olivia-banks 93 days ago
I actually hear about this fairly often. In quite a few of my college classes, there's a large focus on AI (even outside the computer science department). I find it surprising the amount of non-technical people who don't even think to use it, or otherwise haven't interacted with it except when required.
1 comments

I find it surprising how many non-technical friends and family constantly anthropomorphize LLMs, regularly bringing up instances where they "asked AI" about this or that and it "told them" whatever. I'm tired of trying to explain that they are merely statistical sequence generators, don't have a mind, are occasionally completely out to lunch, and ultimately cannot be trusted. This is usually a losing battle. The sheer bullshit that "AI tells them" is often astonishing or ridiculous, but a lot of the time it's given undue weight and trusted anyway. The future is bleak.
I agree. There's also something to be said in it being another level of abstraction, only linguistic instead of technical, but failing to understand that they are "random" is a recipe for disaster.