[NikolaNovak]

I work in IT, have all my life, but these stories still have a sense of bizarre unreality to me, a dream sequence that isn't of real world.

I understand that some companies and people find it extremely empowering and accelerating and convenient to plug AI into prod, but I come from diametrically opposite culture of old school DBA / sysadmin mentality, rather than "move fast and break things" modern dev mentality.

Once it was explained to me, authoritatovely, that hallucinations are mathematically impossible to eliminate, there's just no way I'm not "air / human gapping" any kind of LLM from any kind of prod.

I get these headlines are sensationalist and these cases may or may not be extreme or unusual/unrepresentative, but it's stunning to me how many people go through mandatory AI 101 training, are basically made to acknowledge that LLM will make things up confidently, and promptly forget that. I have executives sending me market research that's fully made-up and techies that are saying software is dead AI can make a payroll system in 5 minutes and everybody wanting to plug LLM into everything. And I'm not saying LLM is useless like some people, I use it multiple times a day for various things - I just cannot imagine giving it root / sysadm access to prod system and database :-/

(even The "unhinged apologies" - unless I'm mistaken, that too is basically fancy autocomplete, correct? It's not that AI "acknowledges" or "understands" or "fesses up" when things went wrong, as even technical media presents it as. It's just what training material / RLHF built as statistical response to a mistake. )

[rafaelmn]

> Once it was explained to me, authoritatovely, that hallucinations are mathematically impossible to eliminate

That's a weak criteria - hallucinations are mathematically impossible to eliminate in humans.

[_aavaa_]

Humans can be held responsible; what are you gonna do to the AI? Wipe the context?

[oceansky]

I was going to say that at least the human brain is deterministic, but a Google search say this is not a scientific consensus

[Corrado]

I think that an eventual consequence of using AI is that more and more of these things will happen. Like you, I'm experienced enough to know that you separate environments completely; nothing shared. This is wisdom and something AI will never obtain. The up-and-coming programmers and engineers using AI for everything will never learn these lessons because they won't be exposed to the problems or really forced to think about these outcomes.

[simplyluke]

The current sentiment within basically all of silicon valley is to remove every possible guardrail and accelerate AI adoption as fast as possible, consequences be damned.

The uptime of major websites recently should be a tell of how well that's going.

[standardly]

I've noticed a general decline in performance across several major applications within the past year or so. Not making any accusations yet, because it could be placebo, or coincidence, or selective bias... but I have my suspicions.