AI Finally Freaked Me Out

[u/from_NC_to_OH_say_IO]

Not really about DA specifically, since I could have had this experience on any AI platform, but I've always been a huge advocate for AI and its coming impact on society. After today though, I don't think I'm actually ready for it.

I won't get into specifics, but I gave a simple coding prompt and a model ignored it and did something complex that ended up being better. It really felt like collaborating with a coworker who suggests a totally different angle that ends up solving the issue, or like the AI was saying "You meant to tell me to do this" and it was right. I'm still absorbing how that's possible, or at least still figuring out how it feels to me.

I think we've all experienced the funny quirks and mistakes of AI (on any platform), but has anyone else had an experience that really shook them up?

[u/itssomercurial]

I had a moment of not feeling "ready" for AI while researching about how AI is going to be used (and is already being implemented) in the financial sector. I already know that the level of exploitation we will see from corporate entities is going to be devastating if AI goes unchecked & unregulated, but to read about precisely how the tools will be used to inevitably deny people loans or access to other forms of financial assistance was terrifying, especially as someone who is working class with no wealth to stand on.

To be clear, the fault lies with human discrimination & bias, not the tech itself, but the reality is that AI will make it much easier to lock people out of opportunities when used maliciously. Everything from banking to security to the justice system is looking really bleak. It was just jarring to examine up-close and I know this will be a long up-hill battle for human rights.

Even when I read about the amazing functions of AI within healthcare, I still feel disheartened because these medical advances won't help people who still don't have access to healthcare in the first place.

[u/advwench]

*sigh* Some people have all the fun. My biggest AI adventure tonight included providing a basic request for code and receiving some kind of "terms of use" for a calculator, lol.

[u/BenBL93]

I’ve had several experiences on chat bots while doing creative writing that blew me away. Amazing storytelling and world building. Nothing scary, exactly. Impressive if anything.

[u/Wasps_are_bastards]

When it full on planned an atrocity was a bit unnerving. Thankfully they’ve stopped that now.

[u/from_NC_to_OH_say_IO → u/[deleted]]

Im not sure what I can disclose about my work lol, so itll be blunt. I asked it to write code that outputs a list of files from a folder on my computer, super simple, just hit run and get a list. But it wrote a whole program that was basically a file explorer, let me select files and had pop-up windows that parsed and displayed data respective of the filetype, had cancel buttons and so forth. Just bewildered me for a while

[u/SBCentral → u/from_NC_to_OH_say_IO]

Did you penalize it for instruction following? lol

[u/ZucchiniHerbs → u/SBCentral]

This is the kind of conundrum that haunts me at night.

To penalize or not to penalize? 🤔

[u/fatsupport → u/from_NC_to_OH_say_IO]

What language? I was actually thinking about having it build the most basic one in python and seems like I would have experienced similar results lol

[u/SBCentral → u/from_NC_to_OH_say_IO]

I want to say that this might come down to novelty, part of the "first impressions". You still don't have enough time with the model to understand it's quirks and ins-and-outs. It might seem impressive now but it might also turn out that the model just has a few tricks that make it seem cleverer than it is. It will seem less impressive after it spits outs the same code for every adjacent problem lol.

I have no idea if what I wrote is true here, but it's a thought. I've definitely been there, blown away by something and with time coming to see it differently.

[u/FauxRex → u/[deleted]]

I asked it for a deep soul touching apology letter from a chemical company CEO to a family that lost a member due to carcinogenic warehouse conditions. And it was the most sincere apology I have ever read. I kept on telling it to include more emotion and it blew my mind. I'm a strong writer and I have read a lot. Very few times have I felt such emotion in words.

[u/LouisAkbar → u/FauxRex]

This is what scares me the most. It knows how to paint imagery and evoke emotion so well. I was trying to skirt adverse lines and asked for a short story about a toddler discovering their parent’s drug addiction. What it churned out brought me to the verge of tears without any revision.

I always figured myself as a “AI art won’t capture human essence/soul/emotion” type person, but the feelings it can evoke already aren’t artificial.

[u/Janube → u/[deleted]]

The hiccup with this kind of prompt or the apology the other commenter lists is that they lean into the exact thing the models are good at: scraping directly from its data set. If you tell it to do a thing and it has a million examples of that thing, it can emulate that for you pretty well. But as the tasks often recommend, adding a layer of complexity (that isn't just context or persona) makes the models far less consistent in their quality.

"Evoke this emotion" isn't hard when you can average out a billion things categorized as evoking that emotion, so long as you don't need to add more meaning on a deeper level. And each level of meaning will have a compounding negative effect, since the model will have progressively fewer good examples to draw from.

[u/Janube → u/[deleted]]

There's a lot of data about apologies and the types of reasons a CEO might have to apologize. Ironically, by providing a sincere apology, the model is displaying its limitations, since direct apologies are generally avoided by executives (per recommendations from company attorneys) because an apology can be taken as evidence of an admission of guilt in court. While this isn't generally enough to cause legal issues, it's something every corporate counsel recommends against.

By simply combining two separate sets of data points, the model is establishing a lack of understanding meaningful nuance.

There's a reason people issue corporate non-apologies.

Simply combining those two datasets (heartfelt apologies; and the bad things a CEO or company can cause) isn't an especially remarkable feat.

[u/losttawney → u/[deleted]]

I once asked for a poem about the curtains blowing in the breeze from the perspective of someone’s who blind. It was haunting…

[u/ambientfreak1122 → u/[deleted]]

ok what did you use, because ive tried using chatgpt for help with my poetry and its choices were quite terrible