Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines

Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by bjourne on Monday February 10, 2025 @10:02AM (#43001092)

What I find frightening is how many are willing to take LLM output at face value. An argument is won or lost not on its merits, but by whether the LLM say so. It was bad enough when people took whatever was written on Wikipedia at face value, trusting an LLM that may have hardcoded biases and is munging whatever data it comes across is so much worse.

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by xvinci on Monday February 10, 2025 @12:01PM (#43002462)

I think it brings forward all the low-performers and people who think they are smarter than they really are. In the past, many would just have stayed silent unless they recently read an article or saw something on the news by chance. Now, you will get a myriad of ideas and plans with fatal flaws and a 100% score on LLM checkers :)

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by micromacrofoot on Monday February 10, 2025 @11:45AM (#43002280)

People take texts full of unverifiable ghost stories written thousands of years ago at face value to the point that they base their entire lives on them.

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by AlienRobot on Monday February 10, 2025 @10:48AM (#43001620)

I've seen someone use an LLM to summarize a paper to post it on reddit for people who haven't read the paper.

Papers have abstracts...

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by MetaWhirledPeas on Monday February 10, 2025 @01:33PM (#43003507)

Sounds fun, if only to compare it to the abstract.

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by AlienRobot on Monday February 10, 2025 @01:58PM (#43003799)

You know, these days I think the abstracts are generated by LLMs too. And the paper. Or at least it uses something like Grammarly. If things keep going this ways typos are going to be a sign of academic integrity.

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by lithocarpus on Monday February 10, 2025 @02:22PM (#43004115)

A proper LLM will include realistic rates of typos eventually. ;)

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by AlienRobot on Monday February 10, 2025 @05:07PM (#43005888)

Darn.

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by owl_vision on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @02:47PM (#43017443)

Amen, Eliza wins.

The humans' mistakes of irrational response still boggles my mind.

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by Mistletoe on Monday February 10, 2025 @12:37PM (#43002893)

I’d take the Wikipedia answer any day. Millions of eyes on each article vs. a black box with no eyes on the outputs.

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by Loughla on Monday February 10, 2025 @01:55PM (#43003756)

Even Wikipedia is a problem though. There are so many pages now that self-reference is almost impossible to detect. Meaning, the citation of a statement made on Wikipedia that uses an outside article for reference, which is an article that was originally written using that very Wikipedia article as its own citation.

It's all about trust. Trust the expert, or the crowd, or the machine.

They're all able to be gamed.

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by bccdee on Monday February 10, 2025 @02:07PM (#43003942)

False equivalence. "Nothing is perfectly unreliable, therefore everything is (broadly) unreliable, therefore everything is equally unreliable." No, some sources are substantially more reliable than others.

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by tremon on Monday February 10, 2025 @02:18PM (#43004065)

*perfectly reliable, but yes.

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by JPLeRouzic on Monday February 10, 2025 @05:03PM (#43005835)

> "Millions of eyes on each article"

Only a minority of users contribute regularly (126,301 have edited in the last 30 days):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#Number_o...

And there are 6,952,556 articles in the English Wikipedia, so an average article is corrected every 55 months (more than 4 years).

It's hardly "Millions of eyes on each article"

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by crackalamoo on Tuesday February 11, 2025 @02:17AM (#43009926)

But of those 126,301 people who have edited in the last 30 days, some of them have edited more than one article. In fact, some have made up to millions of edits (lifetime), which disproportionately increases the total. At least 5000 people have edited more than 24,000 times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_...

(And also: each editor has (approximately) 2 eyes :) )

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by jurli on Monday February 10, 2025 @01:45PM (#43003629)

This is what people said about the internet too. Remember the whole "do not ever use Wikipedia as a source". I mean sure, technically correct, but human beings are generally imprecise and having the correct info 95% of the time is fine. You learn to live with the 5% error

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by seliopou on Monday February 10, 2025 @01:53PM (#43003732)

A buddy won a bet with me by editing the relevant Wikipedia article to agree with his side of the wager.

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Re:Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines by tucnak on Monday February 10, 2025 @05:10PM (#43005925)

> frightening

Don't be scared of "the many," they're just people, not unlike you.

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