Hallucinating sources

I looked up on google at one point what the minimum required depth for a cable running under a building is by NEC code. It told me it was 0 inches. I laughed and called it stupid, wtf do you mean 0 inches?? Upon further research, 0 inches is the correct answer, I felt real stupid after that -_-

Yeah, LLMs are great if you treat them like a tool to create drafts or give you ideas, rather than like an encyclopedia.

I'll get hate for this but in most tasks people use them for they are pretty dang accurate. I'm talking about frontier models fyi

You can tell it “you made that data up, do not do that”

I wish people would stop treating these tools as intelligent.

I have found AI to be a terrible primary source. But something I've found very useful is to ask for a detailed response, structured a certain way. Then tell the AI to grade it as a professor would. It actually does a very good job at acknowledging gaps and giving an honest grade then.

AI shouldn't be a primary source but it's great for starting a topic. Similar to talking to someone that's moderately in the know on something you interested in

That's because ALL generative AI results, even the correct ones, are "made up". They just exist on a spectrum of coincidental correspondence with reality. I'm still surprised that they manage to get as much right as they do.

A thousand wrong answers are more innovative than a single correct one.

The core of the scam is making people believe that "novel" is the same as "better".

The only thing Gemini is good for is bringing up sources that don't appear in the regular Google search results. Which only leads to another question: why are those links not in the regular Google search results?

Infinite money, all the data on the internet, and nothing to show for it. I wrote about my experience with Gemini assistant for people who enjoy suffering.

That’s one of my skills as a certified genius. I’m wicked fast at math.

37/2.4 boom 16.38.

Is it right, maybe, maybe not. But I did it fast

This is the most common response from AI on search pages when I'm trying to find some kind of setting.

That’s the most infuriating thing.

I’m trying to learn how to do new things, well, basically all the time.
Right now I’m stalled out on a sorta important personal project to teach myself about containers/micro-services/certs in a homelab environment. And what I’m discovering is that I don’t know enough to know I don’t know enough - it used to be that I’d take on an ambitious project, mess up, figure out how to overcome that, then learn by looking at what did work, and do better in the future.
But every technical project lately has gotten to the point where I’m trying to just get something, anything, to work or make sense, but every convincing enough AI generated page sets me back by several days as I troubleshoot the convincing enough steps and find myself realizing they’re referencing YAML settings from apps that aren’t part of the service, that every page directs me to install Python, Node, or whatever other helper app directly on my machine that would normally run in a container (which defeats the purpose of trying to containerize things - some stuff I want to use relies on non-compatible versions/configurations). There’s a very clear disconnect from what I’m seeing and what I’m understanding, and the utter lack of authoritative information/proliferation of useless info has just crippled my ability to identify and resolve the disconnect. It’s honestly soul crushing.

It resembles that "have you ever tried not being mutant/gay/depressed/etc." classic line.

Gemini fails at software "how to" questions all the time. Maybe 50% of my results are accurate? To be fair, as with most software outfits, Google's own docs are often dated.

It's amazing that they get it right 40 % of the time then.

You shouldn't use them to keep up with the news. They make that option available because it's wanted, but they shouldn't.

It should only be used to research older data from its original dataset, perhaps adding to it a bit with newer knowledge if you're a specialist in the field.

When you ask the right questions in the right way, you'll get the right answers, or at least mostly - and you should always check the sources after. But it's a specialists tool at this time. And most people are not specialists.

So this whole "Fuck AI" movement is actually pretty damn stupid. It's good to point out its flaws, try and make people aware and help guide it better into the future.

But it's actually useful, and not going away. You're just using it wrong, and as the tech progresses, ways to use it wrong will decrease. You can't stop progress, humanity will always come with new things, evolution is designed that way.

But they are used like search engine... A lot... That is a huge issue.

They do have search functionality. For Perplexity it's even the main focus. Yeah, it's hard to stop them from confidently making things up.

Tell that to the companies slowly replacing conventional search with AI.

AI search is a game-changer for those companies. It keeps you on their site instead of clicking away. So they retain your attention, and needn’t share any of the economic benefit with the sources that make it possible.

And when we criticize the quality of the results, who’s gonna hold them accountable for nonsense? “It’s just a tool, after all”, they say, Caveat emptor!”

Nevermind that they have a financial incentive to yield results that avoid disrespecting your biases, and offer no more than a homeopathic dose of utility — to keep you searching but never finding.

It’s a sprawling problem, that stems from the lack of protections around monopoly power, the attention economy, cribbing off other people’s work, and misinformation.

Your comment is technically correct. “You’re using the wrong tool” is a valid footnote. But it’s not the crux of the issue.

Google and to some extent Micro$oft (and Amazon) have all sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into this bullshit technidiocy because they want AI to go out and suck up all the data on the Internet and then come back to (google or wherever) and present it as if it's "common knowledge".

Thereby rendering all authoritative (read; human, expensive) sources unnecessary.

Search and making human workers redundant has always been the goal of AI.

AI does not understand what any words mean. AI does not understand what the word "word" means. It was never going to work. It's been an insanity money pit from day one. This simple fact is only now beginning to leak out because they can't hide it anymore.

Except Perplexity, which is indeed a search engine.. which might explain why it does so well there.

Would be weird for an ad to bash on the paid tier

Idk but search is what they do, they use regular AI models like chatgpt or claude with their own search tool.

Well it worked cause it convinced me to give it a try. I even installed the app.

Liking it so far. It doesn't patronize me like Gemini does; it isn't at all afraid to correct me when I'm wrong.

Perplexity is by far the best for searching but still copiously hallucinates.

Perplexity Pro: we take all of the non-answers and give you completely incorrect answers!

It's a drop in the bucket compared to what's actually causing damage like vehicles and plane travel.

Estimates for [training and building] Llama 3 are a little above 500,000 kWh[b], a value that is in the ballpark of the energy use of a seven-hour flight of a big airliner.

https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/the-energy-footprint-of-humans-and-large-language-models/

That's around 570 average american homes.

That being said, it's a malicious and stupidly formed comparaison. It's like comparing the cost of building a house vs staying in a hotel for a night.

The model, once trained can be constantly re-used and shared. The llama model has been downloaded millions of time. It would be better to compare it to the cost of making the movie.

An average film production with a budget of $70 million leaves behind a carbon footprint of 3,370 metric tons – that’s the equivalent of powering 656 homes for a year!

https://thestarfish.ca/journal/2025/01/understanding-the-environmental-impact-of-film-sets#:~:text=While%20it's%20easy%20to%20get,656%20homes%20for%20a%20year!

Time for nuclear to make a comeback.

Yeah, this isn't a general test of "factualness", it's a very narrow and specific subset of capability that many of these AIs were not designed for.

That being said, it does not change my already poor opinion of generative AI.

That's not true, it looks like it does improve. More correct and so-so answers.

Use an ad blocker and be diligent in your search. Relying on AI makes you dumber

Do you really prefer to look at traditional search engine results and read all the AI trash that's been SEOed to appear at the top of your results?? At this point I'd rather search with AI.

Nah, I’ll take Door #3: give me a good search engine that filters out that SEO’d garbage, and that doesn’t use AI at all. That’s what I want.

As if they wouldn't inject just as many ads once they have enough market share.

Thinking they aren't going to inject ads into AI at some point is naive.

https://ublockorigin.com/

On Firefox, this even blocks Youtube ads.

And how do you know the AI results aren’t advertisements? I honestly prefer them to show me straight up ads rather than disguising them as content.