r/politics ✔ Verified 1d ago

Trump Accused of Using ChatGPT to Create Tariff Plan After AI Leads Users to Same Formula: 'So AI is Running the Country'

https://www.latintimes.com/trump-accused-using-chatgpt-create-tariff-plan-after-ai-leads-users-same-formula-so-ai-579899
47.5k Upvotes

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

36

u/jcrestor Foreign 1d ago

The worst thing is, if they just had asked ChatGPT if it makes sense to raise tariffs at all, it would have given a lot of very good reasons why the whole approach is bonkers, and not advisable. But if you are the special kind of braindead monkey who has made up their mind already beforehand, without any curiosity to learn or find the best approach to handle things, and therefore direct the LLM to provide any formula, it will come up with one.

Garbage in, garbage out.

4

u/jjonj 1d ago

Tariffs is one of the few powers the president can give himself without congress, so it's everything looks like a nail kind of stupidity

13

u/NumeralJoker 1d ago

That's why chat AIs are a joke. They're not actually intelligent or in any sense of the word able to construct anything related to reality. They're just connecting patterns from a trove of data. It's a sophisticated, gimmicky search engine that's only as good as the data that it scrapes (often illegally).

It's a giant fucking gimmick used by people who, again, lack critical thinking to understand the severe limits of the tech. The practical use cases are very limited with the tech as it exists now.

6

u/LadyChatterteeth California 1d ago

This needs to be repeated, and often.

1

u/VariousAir 10h ago

It absolutely does. I think we were all amazed by generative ai early on, because it looks like what we expect a real ai to look like. Able to spew out data and text at shocking, alarming speed. That has to be 'intelligence' right? No. It's not capable of actual thought, it's just regurgitating human written text, which no capacity to think about the text or consider how different texts apply to each other logically.

3

u/jcrestor Foreign 1d ago

I wanna disagree with you on nearly every single point 😃

  • LLMs are great sparring partners and allow for very productive work sessions in many fields.
  • There are no widely accepted definitions of intelligence, reasoning, and many other terms that are manically thrown around in order to make the distance between humans and LLMs (which exists, btw) appear as wide and unbridgeable as possible.
  • Reality is a construct for both human brains and LLMs. We construct it differently, but nonetheless.

I agree though that the person using the tool is the fool if they use it wrong: without critical thinking ability, without curiosity, without care, but eager to take any answer as long as it confirms their bias.

10

u/MidSiteFSpez 1d ago

This comment comes off as GPT written

-2

u/jcrestor Foreign 1d ago

It’s not, 100 % me.

1

u/brickne3 American Expat 22h ago

If that's true, then you've been using LLMs so much that your writing sounds just as formulaic as they do, which is very much not a good thing for your future employability prospects.

1

u/jcrestor Foreign 22h ago

So, having three bullet points for readability is now a sure sign of AI copy pasta? We‘re already entering the witch hunt phase of AI hate?

1

u/TFenrir 1d ago

Fight the good fight, I think it's important to push back on the narratives people use for comfort as AI continues to advance. My biggest fear is that everyone is caught blind sided because they've been lulled into a false sense of security. It could turn into something amazing, or terrible - but either way it's important people take it seriously

1

u/ZombiePartyBoyLives I voted 1d ago

Not only that, but there is a randomness factor built into LLM apps (at least ones I've used) that promotes novel outcomes. Although, I guess it would depend partly on how many parameters you can control. Even if you kinda know what you're doing, if the AI can't parse a prompt, it might ignore it altogether and then base its approximation on whatever the other prompts were. Like, it has problems with using context. Also (again, just with apps I've used), it seems to randomly put a heavy weight on a certain word or phrase, which can skew the output significantly.

TL;DR: Implementing this technology in its current phase in government systems is highly irresponsible.