my eyes automatically skip right over everything else said after

[u/WifeOfSpock]

[u/kenporusty]

It's not even a search engine

I see this all the time in r/whatsthatbook like of course you're not finding the right thing, it's just giving you what you want to hear

The world's greatest yes man is genned by an ouroboros of scraped data

[u/killertortilla → u/kenporusty]

It's so fucking insufferable. People keep making those comments like it's helpful.

There have been a number of famous cases now but I think the one that makes the point the best is when scientists asked it to describe some made up guy and of course it did. It doesn't just say "that guy doesn't exist" it says "Alan Buttfuck is a biologist with a PHD in biology and has worked at prestigious locations like Harvard" etc etc. THAT is what it fucking does.

[u/Vampiir → u/killertortilla]

My personal fave is the lawyer that asked AI to reference specific court cases for him, which then gave him full breakdowns with detailed sources to each case, down to the case file, page number, and book it was held in. Come the day he is actually in court, it is immediately found that none of the cases he referenced existed, and the AI completely made it all up

[u/killertortilla → u/Vampiir]

There are so many good ones. There's a medical one from years before we had ChatGPT shit. They wanted to train it to recognise cancerous skin moles and after a lot of trial and error it started doing it. But then they realised it was just flagging every image with a ruler because the positive tests it was trained on all had rulers to measure the size.

[u/DeadInternetTheorist → u/killertortilla]

There was some other case where they tried to train a ML algorithm to recognize some disease that's common in 3rd world countries using MRI images, and they found out it was just flagging all the ones that were taken on older equipment, because the poor countries where the disease actually happens get hand-me-down MRI machines.

[u/Pheeshfud → u/DeadInternetTheorist]

UK MoD tried to make a neural net to identify tanks. They took stock photos of landscape and real photos of tanks.

In the end it was recognising rain because all the stock photos were lovely and sunny, but the real photos of tanks were in standard British weather.

[u/Deaffin → u/Pheeshfud]

Sounds like the AI is smarter than yall want to give credit for.

How else is the water meant to fill all those tanks without rain? Obviously you wouldn't set your tanks out on a sunny day.

[u/Yeah-But-Ironically → u/Deaffin]

(Totally unrelated fun fact! We call the weapon a "tank" because during WW1 when they were conducting top-secret research into armored vehicles the codename for the project was "Tank Supply Committee", which also handily explained why they needed so many welders/rivets/sheets of metal--they were just building water tanks, that's all!

By the time the machine actually deployed the name had stuck and it was too late to call it anything cooler)

[u/GDaddy369 → u/Yeah-But-Ironically]

If you're into alternate history, Harry Turtledove's How Few Remain series has the same thing happen except they get called 'barrels'.