[SR2Z]

No he's got a point, if your friend and OpenAI both preface their statements with "I'm not a doctor but..." then there is no reason for it to be ok when one does this and not the other.

We're several years into having LLMs be publically available. If people still don't understand their limitations it's not the models' fault. This situation in my mind is kind of similar to a random person googling symptoms and then brainlessly reading the first website they find.

I think that argument is pretty persuasive, actually, because I use these things all the time and am well aware they're prone to bullshit. I cannot fathom someone with unstable blood pressure and other unexplained symptoms not going to see an actual doctor JUST BECAUSE ChatGPT told them they were fine, and it makes even less sense that anyone would listen to a soulless machine talking about "God's plan." FFS, when you have serious medical symptoms, JUST GO TO THE ER. They get plenty of people convinced they swallowed their earbuds while sleeping, someone with fluctuating blood pressure is so much more serious.

If the argument you're making is "some people are too stupid to be trusted with an LLM" then you should say that, but otherwise this is crazy.

[dijksterhuis]

this situation says more about rampant/unchecked/unregulated businesses and the american legal system/beliefs around regulation than anything.

mcdonald’s coffee “warning: contents may be hot” comes to mind as a previous example.

fast food businesses were competing to serve the hottest coffee and one of them ended up scalding a woman so badly they were forced to put warnings on their coffee cups.

replace coffee being hot with LLMs. replace scalding with stopping someone seeking medical assistance.

but it’s okay because #murica #trustUsBro #profitsBeforePeople /s

[SR2Z]

Nobody would expect their coffee to be almost boiling, everybody should expect an LLM to give slop answers from time to time.

Even Steve Jobs died early because he took vibes-based advice instead of just listening to doctors. You can snark about capitalism all you want, but at some point people are in charge of their own health.

[dijksterhuis]

> everybody should expect an LLM to give slop answers from time to time.

oh really? because that’s not how they’re being advertised or marketed. they’re being touted as oracles that can answer any and all of your questions

with a tiny disclaimer in greyed out text at the bottom of the ui that says they sometimes get things wrong.

> You can snark about capitalism all you want, but at some point people are in charge of their own health.

firstly, i’m not snarking about capitalism. i’m snarking about american companies.

second. yes. but when someone is less able to look after themselves there is a question to answer about the influence something like an LLM is having on them.

ai psychosis is a documented and real phenomena. people fall into rabbit holes because of the sycophantic nature of the models. and the models are sycophantic not because it makes them better at answering questions, the sycophancy makes them worse at that. they’re made more sycophantic because it gets people to engage with the models more and more.

dark pattern addictive design causing real world harms, being dismissed and waved off, yet again from american companies.

[SR2Z]

> oh really? because that’s not how they’re being advertised or marketed. they’re being touted as oracles that can answer any and all of your questions

No, they're being advertised as useful tools. Obviously the tool salesmen are gonna inflate their capabilities, but in the past few years I've never heard ANYONE important make the claim that they're always correct. I've seen that used as an attack pretty often though.

> ai psychosis is a documented and real phenomena. people fall into rabbit holes because of the sycophantic nature of the models.

Yes but it's not like random otherwise healthy people do this which seems to be what you're implying. There are clearly other risk factors at play here and it's not obvious how much the AI is contributing. Psychosis isn't new and AI hasn't moved the needle much.

> and the models are sycophantic not because it makes them better at answering questions, the sycophancy makes them worse at that. they’re made more sycophantic because it gets people to engage with the models more and more.

Or... people just happen to like it when the model speaks in a friendly voice and that desire is impossible to separate out when you're figuring out if an LLM's response is good.

Don't try and put this on American companies when you can just go to r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and see pretty plainly that lots of people insist of syncophancy. Obviously this isn't good or healthy, but it's not wrong or nefarious. It's certainly not an America-only phenomenon.