[rockostrich]

There are 3 kinds of mechanics:

Scammers who do the lowest effort diagnostic and "fix" to get you to pay a smaller amount of money to fix the problem in the short term even though it'll re-present itself a week/month/year later.

Upsellers who will find other things "wrong" with your car and pressure you into paying to fix them because they sound a lot worse than they are.

Good mechanics that will explain what they did to diagnose the issue and recommend different options depending on what the issue is.

Funnily enough, I've found that doctors tend to also fit into these 3 archetypes.

[palata]

Yes, and that's a problem. Doctors (or experts in general) hate it when people don't trust them, but the thing with experts is that people have to trust them. And in my life (and a few times just in the last few years), enough doctors have been wrong enough that I cannot just trust them anymore [1]. If it is important, I will ask them to explain to me, and sometimes I will just ask for a second opinion.

I have read about doctors complaining that "with AI, patients now come with their own diagnosis and don't trust us when we say it's bullshit, and it is a problem". I can feel for them, but if they give the feeling that they don't listen to the patients and the patients don't trust them, it's not only the patients' fault, I would say.

[1]: I have more than one examples of my relatives like this: A doctor says "wow that's bad go to the ER", the ER says "nope it's all good, go home", first doctor learns about that and says "WTF you GO TO THE ER, call me and I will insult them on the phone", and finally resulting in a surgery where the doctors say "they were lucky we could operate right now, because in a matter of hours they could have died from this". How in the world can I trust them after one event like this? Happened to me (in some variation) 3 times. Not based on an LLM diagnosis in the first place: based on a doctor's diagnosis.

[rockostrich]

Heh, I hear stories like that everyday from my partner who is an ICU nurse. Not as dire, but there are constant inter-department arguments about moving patients because of resource constraints and the ICU could end up completely understaffed/resource constrained if the wrong NP or charge nurse is working. I'm amazed our healthcare system works at all to be honest.

[nums]

Maybe a difference here is asking AI for conclusions. When I have it do a buyer's report for me, I ask it for "what questions should I be asking? What are typical things that go wrong with this type of vehicle?" I don't delegate conclusions to the AI but use it to educate myself. Then, I can gather further information to make MY decision .. to buy it or not.

[rockostrich]

I don't think so. LLMs tend to over-index on providing results in general whether it's a conclusion or not. When you ask it "What are typical things that go wrong with this type of vehicle?" you're forcing it to make a conclusion about which results to include and it will almost certainly provide results even if those issues aren't as much of a concern compared to typical issues with other vehicles.

For example, I just prompted Kimi-K2.6 with:

> I'm considering buying a used base model 2010 Honda Civic with 80k miles that's been garage kept. What are typical things that go wrong with this type of vehicle?

It listed 10 issues including the engine block cracking (which wasn't even an issue with 2010 Civics). Started a new chat and asked about a 2010 Toyota Camry, another unbelievably reliable car, and it listed 9 similar issues. Started a new chat and asked about a 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee, a notoriously unreliable vehicle, and it listed the same number of issues.

Sure it's data to make decisions on either way, but it really all comes down to how good your prompts are and whether or not you can think critically about the output, whether or not that output is a conclusion or just data collection.