[zozbot234]

> Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food.

Mostly because food is incredibly cheap, so it's not the main focus of present-day economies. AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life. The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions, not really in cranking out tokens to somehow help write complex software. And other service work is perhaps in the middle of this range.

[pdonis]

> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life.

Such as? AI can't do my laundry, wash my dishes, clean my house, do my food shopping for me. AI can't care for me if I'm sick.

> The most natural and most cost-effective use of AI is arguably in helping answer simple questions

But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable.

How is this a benefit?

[TuringTest]

> But the answers it gives are not reliable. They sound plausible if you don't know anything about the subject, but they're not reliable.

Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about. It may be immensely valuable even if some details are off. That's what made the XVIII's Encyclopedia such a valuable tool for civil society.

By the time you get to the point where those wrong details become relevant, you have gotten a basic understanding of what the overall topic is about, so you're prepared to get a second opinion from a different source - and this time you may know enough to start asking relevant questions, rather than starting from full ignorance.

[Terr_]

> Do not underestimate the utility of having a starting point overview on a topic you know absolutely nothing about.

Perhaps, but we already had that in the form of search-engines and primers and how-to guides and Wikipedia. The actionable questions already had answers.

Adding an obsequious device that dynamically hallucinate half of a conversation with not-necessarily-true dialog is (if not a detriment) only a marginal improvement.

[pdonis]

> a starting point overview

Which an unreliable answer is not.

> even if some details are off

Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong. They don't help anyone to get a "basic understanding". All they "help" with is getting a wrong understanding, that the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.

When humans do this, we call them "bullshit artists", and we don't view them favorably. Why should AIs get a pass?

[TuringTest]

> Which an unreliable answer is not.

> Hallucinations are not a matter of some "details" being off. They are a matter of plausible, confident-sounding claims that are just plain wrong.

This is no worse than Wikipedia, or the original encyclopedia for that matter. Those contain dubious claims that you'll need to verify on your own too.

LLMs help because they have a gigantic amount of compressed knowledge, and they are able to find relevant information and present it incredibly fast. You wouldn't trust the ten first results of a Google search either, but you wouldn't say that having a search engine is totally useless and in no way an improvement over your local library, would you?

> the poor person who's asking can't tell is wrong, because it sounds plausible and is stated with such confidence.

True, but having to learn how to use a tool properly doesn't make the tool useless, even if it can hurt those who use it carelessly.

[pdonis]

> you wouldn't say that having a search engine is totally useless and in no way an improvement over your local library, would you?

A search engine that just indexes the web and gives me results is of course a great improvement over my local library.

But LLMs are not the same as a search engine. LLMs don't give me links. (Well, sometimes they do, and sometimes the links don't even exist, or if they exist, they don't actually say what the LLM said they say. At least with a search engine it's just the link, with no claims about what I'll find if I click on it.) They give me authoritative-sounding text. That's what they're for. And no, that text is not coming from "compressed knowledge". Text is not knowledge. Knowledge requires connections with the real world. LLMs don't have that. All they have is text.

A comparison I've used before is between LLMs and Wolfram Alpha. If I ask an LLM what's the distance from New York to Tokyo, the LLM has no idea that New York and Tokyo are places on the Earth, that the distance is a physical distance that can be measured, and that there is a right answer to the question. LLMs just generate text based on what their algorithm spits out as the most likely text to follow my prompt. The LLM doesn't even have any concept of what's happening if it gives me a wrong answer and I tell it the answer is wrong. It will spit out text saying, oh, yes, you're right, that's a wrong answer...and then spit out more text that might contain a different wrong answer, or even the same wrong answer. It literally has no concept that I am trying to extract meaning from its text.

Wolfram Alpha, on the other hand, if I ask it what's the distance from New York to Tokyo, figures out that I'm asking for a geographic distance, looks it up in its database of geographic distances (which has been curated by humans using actual geographic data from actual measurements on the actual Earth), and formats the answer in readable text. That's still a very simple connection to the real world outside of text, but at least it's some connection. LLMs have none. And that is what makes them useless as tools for trying to learn actual knowledge.

[watwut]

> AI does however help provide many basic services that improve quality of life.

Not yet. Like, not at all and there is a constantly expressed threat we will all become poorer and unemployable because of it. I dont believe it, but AI did not made life better ... and its creators claim it will make life worst for most of us. That is their literal sales pitch.

[singpolyma3]

Food isn't "incredibly cheap" to a lot of people