this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
772 points (96.6% liked)

Technology

73878 readers
6273 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Or my favorite quote from the article

"I am going to have a complete and total mental breakdown. I am going to be institutionalized. They are going to put me in a padded room and I am going to write... code on the walls with my own feces," it said.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ganryuu@lemmy.ca 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You're giving way too much credit to LLMs. AIs don't "know" things, like "humans lie". They are basically like a very complex autocomplete backed by a huge amount of computing power. They cannot "lie" because they do not even understand what it is they are writing.

[–] btaf45@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Can you explain why AIs always have a "confidently incorrect" stance instead of admitting they don't know the answer to something?

[–] ganryuu@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I'd say that it's simply because most people on the internet (the dataset the LLMs are trained on) say a lot of things with absolute confidence, no matter if they actually know what they are talking about or not. So AIs will talk confidently because most people do so. It could also be something about how they are configured.

Again, they don't know if they know the answer, they just say what's the most statistically probable thing to say given your message and their prompt.

[–] btaf45@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Again, they don’t know if they know the answer

Then in that respect AIs aren't even as powerful as an ordinary computer program.

say a lot of things with absolute confidence, no matter if they actually know what they are talking about or not.

That was my guess too.

[–] Aggravationstation@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Then in that respect AIs aren't even as powerful as an ordinary computer program.

No computer programs "know" anything. They're just sets of instructions with varying complexity.

[–] btaf45@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

No computer programs “know” anything.

Can you stop with the nonsense? LMFAO...

if exists(thing) {
write(thing);
} else {
write("I do not know");
}

[–] Aggravationstation@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

if exists(thing) {
write(thing);
} else {
write("I do not know");
}

Yea I see what you mean, I guess in that sense they know if a state is true or false.

[–] Matty_r@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Because its an auto complete trained on typical responses to things. It doesn't know right from wrong, just the next word based on a statistical likelihood.

[–] btaf45@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Are you saying the AI does not know when it does not know something?

[–] Matty_r@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Exactly. I'm over simplifying it of course, but that's generally how it works. Its also not "AI" as in Artificial Intelligence, in the traditional sense of the word, its Machine Learning. But of course its effectively had a semantic change over the last couple years because AI sounds cooler.

Edit: just wanted to clarifying I'm talking about LLMs like ChatGPT etc