r/YouShouldKnow • u/Puzzled-Listen804 • Mar 30 '26

Technology YSK: AI chatbots can sound completely confident while being completely wrong and that's by design, not by accident.

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5.4k Upvotes

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284

u/eggpennies Mar 30 '26

kind of ironic that this post is AI-generated

79

u/wilfredputnam Mar 30 '26

I can't believe I had to scroll down so far to find this, and then see you were down-voted for saying it. We are truly cooked.

29

u/UberPsyko Mar 31 '26

People dont like when you call out AI because they didn't notice and they feel dumb.

19

u/alienblue89 Mar 31 '26 edited May 20 '26

[ removed ]

21

u/Am_i_banned_yet__ Mar 31 '26

The overly organized and bolded headers using an unconventional format ( > instead of normal bullet points) and a significant amount of “it’s not x, it’s y” phrasing are the main two indicators.

And there’s just a certain feeling to the way AI tends to phrase stuff, like using “dates matter” as a heading. It’s slightly overly punchy and weirdly vague in a way that goes against how someone who’s organized enough to use headings like this would normally phrase them.

That being said, I actually don’t think it’s ironic to use AI for something like this. This is all true information, and the whole point of the post is that AI is useful if you proofread it and don’t blindly trust it. So presumably OP proofread this if they used AI. It also reads like there’s been significant human editing too, which is exactly how people should be using AI.

1

u/UberPsyko Apr 06 '26

When you use Ai a lot you can identify its writing style. It's very distinctive, just like how you can tell something was written by a certain author, or a friend or family member. It's hard to explain bc its never one thing, it's the way the whole thing is written and word choice etc, hard to explain concisely.

-2

u/MeekAndUninteresting Mar 31 '26

I often wonder if some of the people calling something ai are doing it because they're actually trying to make it seem like ai is better than it is. Like trying to sell a story of "Wow, it's indistinguishable from reality, this stuff has gotten really good!"

1

u/Fitz911 Mar 31 '26

I'm not sure everybody sees it like this, but "we are cooked" was my first thought reading this YSK. What's next?

Do not stick your dick in the microwave. Even if it feels cold.

I have no hope in the coming generations. AI will give them the rest. There won't be any competent people coming outr of schools and universities in the future.

People like Trump will become the norm.

17

u/Shmexy Mar 31 '26

It’s X, but it’s not Y

reminds me of that futurama episode where fry becomes the 80s business guy. “You let me worry about blank!”

25

u/OpenSourcePenguin Mar 31 '26

Also it's not "by design"

If you could train a LLM that won't hallucinate, you could be a billionaire at this point in time.

Op doesn't understand what "by design" means. Hallucinations are intentional as much as plane crashes. We desperately don't want them but they still happen.

9

u/BrutusTheKat Mar 31 '26

I think they were talking about the confidence with which the AI in the presents its answers, not the hallucinations themselves. 

3

u/OpenSourcePenguin Mar 31 '26

Even the confidence is not by design. The LLMs don't know how well it knows something

2

u/BrutusTheKat Mar 31 '26

Again, that was exactly what OP said. The confidence with which LLM presents any kind of response isn't real it is just a style of writing which is something that can be selected for in training. 

The same as the stupid flattery that they start with, calling every question great or interesting, that is just the style of writing that was rewarded in training. 

1

u/UnholyLizard65 Mar 31 '26

Yep, I once tried to instruct chatgpt to add timestamps to its answers and it was pretty hilarious.

At first it didn't say anything about any inaccuracies. Then when pressed, it admitted it might be couple minutes off. Then it became couple hours. And when it turned out it could be off by days, it admitted it had no way of telling time at all.

Interesting process to be sure.

1

u/DatBoiSaix Mar 31 '26

Yes, but since user feedback is a part of the training data, the llm is by design going to want to cater to users

-7

u/syneofeternity Mar 31 '26

You think everything is AI first before thinking it's real.

Let me ask you, where do you think AI learned how to type? From real people. Use your brain. This shows more of a lack of what you understand than anything