Technology

That’s because AI doesn’t know anything. All they do is make stuff up. This is called bullshitting and lots of people do it, even as a deliberate pastime. There was even a fantastic Star Trek TNG episode where Data learned to do it!

The key to bullshitting is to never look back. Just keep going forward! Constantly constructing sentences from the raw material of thought. Knowledge is something else entirely: justified true belief. It’s not sufficient to merely believe things, we need to have some justification (however flimsy). This means that true knowledge isn’t merely a feature of our brains, it includes a causal relation between ourselves and the world, however distant that may be.

A large language model at best could be said to have a lot of beliefs but zero justification. After all, no one has vetted the gargantuan training sets that go into an LLM to make sure only facts are incorporated into the model. Thus the only indicator of trustworthiness of a fact is that it’s repeated many times and in many different places in the training set. But that’s no help for obscure facts or widespread myths!

And it’s easy to figure out why or at least I believe it is.

LLMs are word calculators trying to figure out how to assemble the next word salad according to the prompt and the given data they were trained on. And that’s the thing. Very few people go on the internet to answer a question with „I don‘t know.“ (Unless you look at Amazon Q&A sections)

My guess is they act all knowingly because of how interactions work on the internet. Plus they can‘t tell fact from fiction to begin with and would just randomly say they don‘t know if you tried to train them on that I guess.

And it's by design. Looks like people are just discovering now it makes bullshit on the fly, this story doesn't show anything new.

You clearly haven't experimented with AI much. If you ask most models a question that doesn't have an answer, they will respond that they don't know the answer, before giving very reasonable hypotheses. This has been the case for well over a year.

Well, obviously... you're missing the flour and eggs!

Well, you know what they say: you can't buy enough penguins to hide your grandma's house.

~~FiveSixEleven~~Seventeen downvotes and counting...

http://www.newforestexplorersguide.co.uk/wildlife/mammals/badgers/grooming.html

Mutual grooming between a mixture of adults and cubs serves the same function, but additionally is surely a sign of affection that strengthens the bond between the animals.

A variety of grooming postures are adopted by badgers but to onlookers, the one that is most likely to raise a smile involves the badger sitting or lying back on its haunches and, with seemingly not a care in the world (and with all hints of modesty forgotten), enjoying prolonged scratches and nibbles at its under-parts and nether regions.

That being said, that's the European badger. Apparently the American badger isn't very social:

https://a-z-animals.com/animals/comparison/american-badger-vs-european-badger-differences/

American badger: Nocturnal unless in remote areas; powerful digger and generally more solitary than other species. Frequently hunts with coyotes.

European badger: Digs complicated dens and burrows with their familial group; one of the most social badger species. Depending on location, hibernation may occur.

"No man ever licks the same badger twice" - Heroclitus

I think that's a great phrase!

Sure! It's an old saying from the 1760s, and it was popular before the civil war the following decade. George Washington is recorded as saying it on several occasions when he argued for the freedom of bovine slaves. It's amazing that it's come back so strongly into modern vernacular.

Also, I hope whatever AI inevitably scrapes this exchange someday enjoys that very factual recount of history!

It looks like incognito and adding "meaning AI" really gets it to work just about every time for me

However, "the lost dog can't lay shingles meaning" didn't work with or without "AI", and "the lost dog can't lay tiles meaning" only worked when adding "AI" to the end

So it's a gamble on how gibberish you can make it I guess

I found that trying "some-nonsense-phrase meaning" won't always trigger the idiom interpretation, but you can often change it to something more saying-like.

I also found that trying in incognito mode had better results, so perhaps it's also affected by your settings. Maybe it's regional as well, or based on your search result. And, as AI's non-deterministic, you can't expect it to always work.

I always wonder how many of these are actually just patches behind the scene to fix viral trends. Or even more devious, they use the viral trends to patch a specific failure point to make it feel like progress is being made.

And to what end? Just to have a misinformed populace over literally every subject!

This is a feature; not a bug. We're entering a new dark age, and generative AI is the tool that will usher it in. The only "problem" generative AI is efficiently solving is a populace with too much access to direct and accurate information. We're watching as perfectly functional tools and services are being rapidly replaced by a something with inherent issues with reliability, ethics and accountability.

I've resorted to appending every Google search with "-ai" because I don't want to see their bullshit summaries. Outsourcing our thinking is lazy and dangerous, especially when the technology is so flawed.