There is much news on the accomplishments of AI, adoption thereof by leading companies, and the great amount of money invested in LLM model research and the construction of data centers. As such it is not easy to convince people that AI has limitations and should be used with great care.
An effective way to get people interested in the problem is to show glaring examples of hallucinations. If you ever encounter one you should record it and show it around. Thinking machines have defeated the best human chess and go players of the world. This makes people think that AI is highly intelligent. I believe the process computers use to analyze chess positions is different from the large language models used to generate text responses to questions. Unfortunately both are loosely refered to as "AI" and few people bother to look into the difference. --- You Can't Lick a Badger Twice": Google's AI Is Making Up Explanations for Nonexistent Folksy Sayings - Futurism https://futurism.com/google-ai-overviews-fake-idioms This is getting ridiculous. Apr 23, 2:17 PM EDT by Victor Tangermann Have you heard of the idiom "You Can't Lick a Badger Twice?" We haven't, either, because it doesn't exist - but Google's AI seemingly has. As netizens discovered this week that adding the word "meaning" to nonexistent folksy sayings is causing the AI to cook up invented explanations for them. "The idiom 'you can't lick a badger twice' means you can't trick or deceive someone a second time after they've been tricked once," Google's AI Overviews feature happily suggests. "It's a warning that if someone has already been deceived, they are unlikely to fall for the same trick again." Author Meaghan Wilson-Anastasios, who first noticed the bizarre bug in a Threads post over the weekend, found that when she asked for the "meaning" of the phrase "peanut butter platform heels," the AI feature suggested it was a "reference to a scientific experiment" in which "peanut butter was used to demonstrate the creation of diamonds under high pressure." There are countless other examples. ... --- A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse - New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/technology/ai-hallucinations-chatgpt-google.html A new wave of "reasoning" systems from companies like OpenAI is producing incorrect information more often. Even the companies don't know why. By Cade Metz and Karen Weise Cade Metz reported from San Francisco, and Karen Weise from Seattle. * Published May 5, 2025 Updated May 6, 2025, 4:26 p.m. ET Last month, an A.I. bot that handles tech support for Cursor, an up-and-coming tool for computer programmers, alerted several customers about a change in company policy. It said they were no longer allowed to use Cursor on more than just one computer. In angry posts to internet message boards, the customers complained. Some canceled their Cursor accounts. And some got even angrier when they realized what had happened: The A.I. bot had announced a policy change that did not exist. "We have no such policy. You're of course free to use Cursor on multiple machines," the company's chief executive and co-founder, Michael Truell, wrote in a Reddit post. "Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line A.I. support bot." --- "When you know something say 'I know this.' When you don't know say 'I don't know.' Such is 'to know'." - "The Analects of Confucius" _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
