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Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

Schoolbooks for example have wildly out of date facts, or are brief to the point of inaccuracy. Much less watching any history channel show as those tend to suck badly.

One of the things AI's commonly allow is for people to ask questions without fear of judgement. I've not seen one scowl and call a kid an idiot yet (though I'm sure someone has a jailbreak for that). Having an AI trained to take these kids off the wall (and often based on historical inaccuracies) questions would be a really interesting tool.

Just not the only tool, and not really one that should be fully authoritative in itself.

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> One of the things AI's commonly allow is for people to ask questions without fear of judgement.

Search engines have been around for almost 30 years now and they do this job better than spicy autocomplete. I type stupid questions into Google all the time and get good answers. The "AI" version of this involves strapping a search engine onto a language model, ostensibly to summarize results, but in practice there are examples of the language model just lying instead of doing the actual search for you.

>I type stupid questions into Google all the time and get good answers.

I type questions into Google and frequently get misleading or outright incorrect answers directly in their BS summaries.

> I type questions into Google and frequently get misleading or outright incorrect answers directly in their BS summaries.

This is a good point. If you treat a search engine as a language model and vice versa you will run into issues. These issues compound even further for users that decline to scroll down and click the links that search engines return

I started doing both.

Some result or tasks are better fitted for LLM. Or you want a bullet point response that Google can’t do anymore.

Right, but when a schoolbook-writer doesn’t know something, they don’t just make up an outrageous lie. Not saying LLMs don’t have a place in education, but they have a long way to go.

Feynman would have disagreed with you

https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html

>The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous – they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child.

Gonna adopt this paragraph for describing LLMs

[1964]

Not to be snarky, but education has come quite far since the 60's.

Has it? From what I’ve heard about the textbook industry, I feel like it hasn’t.

Oh sure, a human might hurt your feels so you should only talk to a mechanical turk.

We are all clearly going mad.

Based on the number of replies you've made that have been downvoted, I think maybe as a child you are one of those people that would have benefitted from a mechanical turk guiding you how to behave.

Maybe you should reflect on the abuses some humans have received from other humans. For example like your^H their own parents and teachers?

Not all of us have had great lives. People that have been abused tend to abuse others unless someone/something breaks that cycle (and it's almost never about pulling up your own bootstraps).

This was a very rude response coming from a person feeling superior enough to lecture someone else on proper behavior. You could have set an example of the behavior you'd like to see instead of being a jerk.

Oh sure, someone talking to a mechanical turk might hurt your feels so you should only talk to a human.

We are all clearly going mad.

Lol thanks I feel you helped my point

As a large language model, I cannot help points as they may be harmful to humans.

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