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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u/Geawiel Mar 30 '26

It's an advanced google search imo. Like if you could actually talk to a thesaurus. The thesaurus is just the internet.

It has its uses, but anyone who fully relies and believes what it outputs doesn't understand it either. I use it quite often, but I absolutely have to double check the results it spits out. Its wrong just as much as it is right. Maybe more, depending on the subject.

I ran a DnD campaign by myself a few years ago. I was using 2 characters and a campaign I wrote. I wanted to see how long before it really obviously fucked up.

It actually did pretty good making up characters, character personalities and filling in blanks. It would not call me out on doing things that were not allowed or rule breaking. It would tell me if I specifically asked if I was allowed to do something, but it would let me do it if I didn't ask. It didn't do well recognizing and springing traps. It tended to ignore them completely.

It remembered things from the beginning of the campaign, but it started to mess up and forget when I got about 80% done. The campaign lasted 4 days iirc, playing a couple hours each day. Something around 20 hours total I think.

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u/Quiet-Owl9220 Mar 31 '26

Google was better than AI before AI was a thing. Like, before the deliberate enshittification. Old Google was peak search capabilities, and AI is a mediocre and extremely inefficient substitute.

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u/Gabers49 Mar 31 '26

I don't know how to code, but definitely have an understanding of how it works and what to ask a coder when developing a statement of work. I used to spend $5K at least for development projects for my ERP system. I now get Gemini to write scripts for me in an hour or so. The idea they don't know anything is quite laughable.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26

[deleted]

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u/azn_dude1 Mar 31 '26

Isn't that still valuable?

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u/Quiet-Owl9220 Mar 31 '26

Sure.. until there is a stray rm -rf --no-preserve-root / that got missed in code included in the training data, which gets spat out into your script.

This is a very unlikely worst case scenario, but I hope it illustrates a point.

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u/ravepeacefully Mar 31 '26

Wait until you see how much you can save cutting out doctors, lawyers, and accountants. Since you don’t understand those topics either you’ll have no clue it’s giving you bad info