Ancestors

Written by Martijn Faassen on 2025-01-13 at 13:14

When you're a non expert and you talk to someone who gives a lot of answers to questions on a topic, and it seems plausible and coherent, you assume they are an expert.

That heuristic is decent. You may be talking to a bullshitter, scammer or crackpot the chances, but you can often filter those out using common knowledge.

But this heuristic falls flat on its face for AI. An AI can give a lot of decent, plausible answers on a topic. It fits with what you know. Yet it's very far from an expert.

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Toot

Written by Martijn Faassen on 2025-01-13 at 13:16

An AI was trained on a lot of common knowledge and plausible text and it can regurgitate this very well. But as soon as you ask the hard questions it suddenly fails, and worse, this failure is obfuscated.

Such machines can still be useful. I myself am even inclined to attribute a form of intelligence to it. But it's not the same as human intelligence.

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Descendants

Written by kupac^ESC:wq on 2025-01-13 at 13:32

@faassen

Word of advice: chat with an ai about a subject you're an expert in. Like the topic of your PhD thesis, or something you know in and out. It will have a similar level of knowledge about other topics

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Written by Martijn Faassen on 2025-01-13 at 14:25

@kupac Just to be clear: while it's addressed to me, I don't think you're giving me this piece of advice?

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Written by kupac^ESC:wq on 2025-01-13 at 21:03

@faassen

Yep, it was more generic advice. Because that's where you can actually judge the LLM.

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Written by Arend van Beelen on 2025-01-13 at 15:01

@kupac @faassen in fairness, ever tried reading a human-written article in a random news paper about a subject you’re an expert in? 😉

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Written by Martijn Faassen on 2025-01-13 at 15:10

@arendjr @kupac But we also don't expect human experts on a topic to write those newspaper articles.

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