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Comment by f233f2 | Hacker News Reader

Are we really at the point where we need a disclaimer saying "automatic translations may not be accurate"?

I think the average person doesn't understand at all what level of accuracy they can expect from AI tools. That is why you have professors relying on ChatGPT to tell them if a student cheated using ChatGPT.

HN readers already know not to trust it of course.

I agree that the average person doesn't generally know how technology works. I think the solution is not to limit the use of technology but to restrict the exposure of the average person to technology until they can prove that they know how it works (some sort of internet license, if you will)

tbf, with AI, even technologists doesn’t generally know how it works.

Well because we've found our way into a shadow area of non-deterministic computing. With human language, aggregate data and techniques like "Two shot prompting" or vectorization nodes effecting performance on some models we will continue to go into a "gray area" of computing. the question soon becomes "How can I tweak this non-deterministic AGI to tell me the secrets of the universe?"

Maybe the solution here is just what the parent suggested a disclaimer - a small message saying this was translated by an Ai, may not be 100% accurate - just so people are aware. Not for liability but just to make people aware

Maybe we need to develop some iconography to annotate text and images that were produced/generated with AI/ML? Like we have U+2622 to indicate a radiation warning.

Similarly, U+2620 for poison, U+2623 for biological hazard, U+26A1 for electrical hazard or the generic U+26A0 for hazards.

(edited to replace characters with U+ notation)

The average person sees it as "AI" like we think of from the movies. It's a machine brain that can think and communicate. In reality it's just a really good text generator that's really good at sounding confident.

Oversimplifying things doesn’t help anyone here.

People don’t understand the limitations of AI/LLMs because it wasn’t a normal part of their lives until recently. They don’t need to understand how it works to understand that it has limitations and it’s going to be occasionally wrong.

The average person is well aware software isn’t perfect, things break all the time. This is no different.

It’s not a leap to think people will start grasping what current AI can and can’t do simply through a) careful communication and mostly importantly b) using it themselves.

Much of the talk about AI safety is just an elaborate dance around this idea that users will never understand the limitations and will freak out. But these high profile cases (and warning labels) are exactly how people will learn the flaws exist and they’ll get used to the process of it getting slowly better and better.

That's a very good point. There's precedent for it too.

Humans themselves are black boxes too, and yet almost everyone grows to have a good handle on limitation of individuals, both in general and specific to contexts and individuals one encounters. It's not just peer-level understanding - parents quickly learn to understand the limitations and failure modes of newborns, and maintain that understanding as their children grow.

Now human-human understanding is cheating, since we all share the same hardware architecture. But we have no problem with getting a grasp on animal behavior and limits either. Really all it takes is enough personal observation and interaction. It's like we're wired for "getting a feel" for complex systems over time.

> Humans themselves are black boxes too, and yet almost everyone grows to have a good handle on limitation of individuals, both in general and specific to contexts and individuals one encounters.

IME, this is completely false.

"Very smart people" regularly repeat absurd misinformation because they didn't do basic fact checking. Academics, politicians, bureaucrats, police, etc. regularly respond to challenges with an Appeal To Authority, and it _works_.

We're AWFUL at this.

> It's not just peer-level understanding - parents quickly learn to understand the limitations and failure modes of newborns, and maintain that understanding as their children grow.

No, not as a general statement.

Most parents are really bad at understanding the limitations of their children. Even school teachers (who took classes on understanding the limitations of children) are really bad at it.

I almost turned into a human pretzel earlier from the amount of cringe I got from seeing a post on LinkedIn about all the wonderful things ChatGPT can do to make life easier for HR, including "detecting hidden bias" in employee communications. Most of the responses to the post were positive and I'm sure we'll see a lot more of this kind of thing, where people's lives are altered and reputations ruined, due to unrealistic expectations of what ChatGPT can do reliably.

I'm extrapolating a bit, not having read the post, but this reminds me of the old days when they used polygraphs in hiring. Until that was made illegal in the US because it's basically pseudoscience.

when it isn't clear that the translation has been done automatically, then yes

Heck most times it isn't even obvious that you are looking at a translation rather than the original text. Plenty of times I'll visit a website and find the text a bit weird, then realize it's because Chrome has automatically translated it to English from some other language.

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