Cethin

most models I’ve seen now cite sources you can check when they’re reporting factual stuff

Maybe online models can, but local has no access to the internet so it can’t. However, it’s likely generating a response that is predictable that can cite a source, but it could totally make that up. Hopefully people would double check it to make sure it actually is and says what it’s claiming, but we both know most won’t. Citing a source is just a way to make it look intelligent while it still generates bullshit.

Yeah LLMs might be more likely to give bad info, but people are unreliable too, they’re biased and flawed and often have an agenda, and they are frequently, confidently wrong.

You’re saying this like they’re equal. People put thought into it. LLMs do not. Yes, con men exist. However, not everyone is a con man. You can follow authors who are known to be accurate. You can do the same with LLMs. The problem is consistency. A con man will always be a con man. With an LLM you have no way to know if it’s bullshitting this time or not, so you should always assume it’s bullshit. In which case, what’s the point? However, most people assume it’s always honest, because that’s what the marketing leads you to believe

I run local models. The other day I was writing some code and needed to implement simplex noise, and LLMs are great for writing all the boilerplate stuff. I asked it to do it, and it did alright although I had to modify it to make it actually work because it hallucinated some stuff. I decided to look it up online, and it was practically an exact copy of this, down to identical comments and everything.

It is not too diluted to matter. You just don’t have the knowledge to recognize what it copies.

You can look up the author and figure out if they’re a reliable source of information. Most authors either write bullshit or don’t, at least on a particular subject. LLMs are unreliable. Sometimes they return bullshit and sometimes they don’t. You never know, but it’ll sound just as confident either way. Also, people are lead to believe they’re actually thinking about their response, and they aren’t. They aren’t considering if it’s real or not, only if it is a statistically probable output.

Not remotely the same thing. Books almost always have context on what they are, like having an author listed, and hopefully citations if it’s about real things. You can figure out more about it. LLMs create confident sounding outputs that are just predictions of what an output should look like based on the input. It didn’t reason and doesn’t tell you how it generated its response.

The problem is LLMs are sold to people as Artifical Intelligence, so it sounds like it’s smart. In actuality, it doesn’t think at all. It just generates confident sounding results. It’s literally companies selling con(fidence) men as a product, and people fully trust these con men.

Like the other comments say, LLMs (the thing you’re calling AI) don’t think. They aren’t intelligent. If I steal other people’s work and copy pieces of it and distribute it as if I made it, that’s wrong. That’s all LLMs are doing. They aren’t “being inspired” or anything like that. That requires thought. They are copying data and creating outputs based on weights that tell it how and where to put copied material.

I think the largest issue is people hearing the term “AI” and taking it at face value. There’s no intelligence, only an algorithm. It’s a convoluted algorithm that is hard to tell what going on just by looking at it, but it is an algorithm. There are no thoughts, only weights that are trained on data to generate predictable outputs based on given inputs. If I write an algorithm that steals art and reorganizes into unique pieces, that’s still stealing their art.

For a current example, the stuff going on with Marathon is pretty universally agreed upon to be bad and wrong. However, you’re arguing if it was an LLM that copied the artist’s work into their product it would be fine. That doesn’t seem reasonable, does it?