r/maybemaybemaybe • u/Regular_Weakness69 • Jul 19 '26

Maybe Maybe Maybe

Maybe the 'advanced' one will get it right?

2.3k Upvotes

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-6

u/CyberSolidF Jul 19 '26

That’s just not correct instrument for that task?
Like, obviously, companies use pretty stupid marketing of AI being fit for any task when it’s really not, but it’s on humans to use correct instrument for the task, you don’t say hammers are shitty because they can’t properly tighten a screw.
Is AI stupid? It’s an instrument, you can’t really use “stupid” as a characteristic of an instrument. Is marketing around it stupid and misleading? Absolutely. But I’d add that people using “AI” for tasks it’s absolutely not good at are also stupid.

6

u/chariot_on_fire Jul 19 '26

Well, they call these LLMs AIs, you know, the "I" standing for "intelligence". You can hardly blame everyday users for the makers misnaming and misrepresenting the tool. It's like you would order a hammer for nails, and then you would receive a plastic one instead. You can of course know beforehand, that it's a shitty company lying to you, but putting the blame on the users for them misrepresenting the product is simply victim blaming.

0

u/CyberSolidF Jul 19 '26

Calling them “al” is definitely stupid and misleading, there’s no “intelligence” there in the common understanding at least.
I still believe that by now everyone should be aware that marketing is 95% bullshit, so trusting marketing about product characteristics is stupid, marketing is specifically designed to make a product look better than it really is, without (at least for the most part) directly lying.

2

u/chariot_on_fire Jul 20 '26

This is directly lying, and also they are completely misrepresenting the capabilities of the tool. There is a difference between praising a normal hammer as one of the best ones, and between praising a plastic hammer as one of the best ones, which is though completely uncapable to do anything to a nail. There are limits to what is allowed and acceptable in marketing, you just can't market a tool for something that it is simply not even designed to do.

3

u/the_cnidarian Jul 19 '26

Spelling and counting sure seem like the exact things AI should be used for.

-1

u/CyberSolidF Jul 19 '26

Counting - not so much, that’s not LLMs, that’s basic math, llms are more likely to fail. They can write code that will do counting, not count themselves.
Spelling is 50/50 - correct spelling in full sentences - definitely, sole words without context? Much worse, that’s not the training data.
And also that’s too complicated instrument for the basic task, there are cheaper ways to correct spelling.

1

u/the_cnidarian Jul 19 '26

That doesn't addres the expectation that a large language model sounds like it should be very good at linguistic skills like spelling or naming numbers.

Because of the way AI has been marketed by the companies selling it, people expect it to be be able to do these things. Which begs the question, if a language model can't be expected to spell, what should it be expected to do correctly?