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by rickydroll 5 days ago
There's no chance I would trust a human to correctly tell me which wire was the high-voltage one, nor would I trust the documentation. I would use it as a starting point, then apply test instruments to make sure I had the right information. Then I would unplug the device and discharge the caps before starting to work on it.

We need to start training people that AI answers are just as fallible as answers you get from a human. Trust but verify for all beings, biological and non-biological.

3 comments

They're not even answers, is the thing.

It's like "[actual living person] has big eyes" and "character portrait in a 90s video game has big eyes" are similar sentences on the surface, but they describe things as far part from each other as a single dot left by bird poop vs. the combined writings of all humans, ever. Like half an atom compared to a universe.

Same for "beings". Just no. Or rather, I apply what you suggest to what you said, I don't just take your word for it but inspect if what you said could be true, and realise your answer is so full of false premises it's not even wrong.

> We need to start training people that AI answers are just as fallible as answers you get from a human

You're right, BUT, humans don't risk to take responsibility if they clearly don't know the answer, they would at least tell you: I don't know, let me find someone who might know or X, Y, Z might be able to help you.

AI: Bro, trust me, this is 100% accurate, I give you my teeth if you find it wrong. ... later on ... You're absolutely right, I was wrong, lets try another approach

> BUT, humans don't risk to take responsibility if they clearly don't know the answer

Where do you live?

People say the craziest shit about topics they are completely ignorant of. Even important things like medical advice, and not just internet pundits or crappy journalists.

Even people that care for you (friends or family) can give terrible advice. Saw it yesterday with one friend advising another on a legal matter that I thought obviously demanded a lawyer and a strategy. Another suggested some bad job seeking advice.

Personal advice is the worst, and highly important.

There's an art to finding good experts. And an art to filtering what anyone says.

AI psychosis.

No, LLM generated answers are not the same as those from a qualified expert. Of course you should trust a human if that is their job and you should never trust a word generator to give you accurate answers to an important question.

Like the term "slop", misuse of a pop psychology term like "AI psychosis" is another block to critical thinking and a casual dismissal of a conversation.

You're right, LLM-generated answers are not the same as those from a qualified expert. Sometimes they're better.

Case in point. I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine about going off propranolol. He wanted to stop it because he didn't like the side effects and only wanted to take it as needed for anxiety-related problems in public situations. His primary care said to just stop taking the drug. Gemini told him that you need to have a tapering protocol, and you need to work it out with your doctor.

In this case, his primary care, theoretically a "qualified expert," was wrong, and Gemini was right. His course of action at that point was to get a new primary care that had better knowledge that matched the vetted medical sites I pointed him to.

fwiw, he trusted my advice and validation of his plan to get a new primary care doctor. The reason he trusted me is that he's seen the prescription drug disasters I've gone through, and knows how deeply I've had to educate myself as a form of self-defense.

Great example, but not for the reasons you think. You have zero qualifications to make that judgement call. You don’t know if the standard protocol was right in this instance or inappropriate (depends on dose side effects etc etc) and I certainly wouldn’t go anywhere near Gemini to try to verify that.

Please stop relying on word generators for medical advice, period.

Yes, you don't rely on an LLM solely for medical advice. You use it to get orientation to look at other sources. In my friend's case, I was relaying to him what I learned when taking a similar drug, my doctor's cautions on stopping the drug, what the manufacturer says about stopping the drug, and the published dosing schedule.

I guess you're right about me having zero qualifications. I only have a lifetime of experience with treatments for the various conditions I live with and the dozens of drugs that have failed to treat these conditions. I've been forced into self-education (learning how to read the research papers and the manufacturer info sheets) just like any patient with a complex medical situation needs to do for self-advocacy. This knowledge has helped me catch doctors' prescribing mistakes. I wish I'd had the skill before one such mistake toasted my kidneys.

Would the same doctor also casually give you advice on suicide, confirm the suitability of a piece of rope, and all that? You cannot cherry pick like that.

When you talk of "answers" in the same category as humans give them, of "beings", you already are outside the realms of critical thought.

> I wish I'd had the skill before one such mistake toasted my kidneys.

I wish the people who died from bad LLM advice were still alive. Many of them had their life still ahead of them. You can't guilt me into confusing generated text with answers while ignoring all that. I also have pain and suffering in my life, one aspect of it are these attempts to devalue humans by putting probabalitities of words humans produced on the same level as them, calling them "beings" and all that. If I could remove all intellectual dishonesty from the world and have some pain in my right hand side diodes in exchange, I'd take that bullet for y'all. So I'm not impressed by this tear duct jerking.

> Please stop relying on word generators for medical advice

Ironic that you are giving medical advice.

You might as well say don't read books.

This is not medical advice, it’s advice on living - in most cases, trust that experts in a subject know more than you and have more context than you.
We'll see. I'm guessing you'll have to accept a very different world.
We're seeing, right now, that the people pushing for it are doing it in ways just as you do. Maybe you'll have to accept being considered a second class slop human, who knows? Or do the threats only flow one way?
If you see what I said as a threat, I'm afraid it shows more your state of mind, than anything I've typed.
In safety critical jobs nobody is trusted, everything is verified. And there is someone checking the checker.
This is not always true - e.g. gas engineers and electricians do safety critical work every day without supervision, and we trust them to do so because they are certified and they are held responsible for failures.

The same standards of care and responsibilty cannot be applied to LLMs, and asking one about electrical safety or medial issues is very similar to googling and trusting the results.

I get that people here want to believe, but the op is far too trusting of LLMs and using them in domains where it is highly inappropriate.

> Of course you should trust a human if that is their job

I’m telling you, in industries dealing with high energy, they DO NOT trust people just because it’s their job. THEY CHECK. Just like people should CHECK the LLM. I think we agree that LLM cannot be trusted. But where we don’t agree is “trust the experts because they’re humans” - that’s not an argument it’s a troll.

> gas engineers and electricians do safety critical work every day without supervision

This simply isn’t true. Electricians work is inspected before being placed into service. Engineers work is reviewed internally and permitted externally before going to construction.

It certainly is true, from experience.

You’ve never actually hired an electrician or gas engineer to work on your house have you?

Also it’s not trust the experts because they are humans but trust the experts because they are experts.