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Comment by crackrook | Hacker News Reader

I would hesitate to hire an intern that makes incorrect statements with maximum confidence and with no ability to learn from their mistakes.

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When you highlight only the negatives, yeah it does sound like no one should hire that intern. But what if the same intern happens to have an encyclopedia for a brain and can pour through massive documents and codebases to spot and fix countless human errors in a snap?

There seems to be two camps: People who want nothing to do with such flawed interns - and people who are trying to figure out how to amplify and utilize the positive aspects of such flawed, yet powerful interns. I'm choosing to be in the latter camp.

Those are fair points, I didn't mean to imply that there are only negatives, and I don't consider myself to be in the former camp you describe as wanting nothing to do with these "interns". I shouldn't have stuck with the intern analogy at all since it's difficult for me to compare the two, with one being fairly autonomous and the other being totally reliant on a prompter.

The only point I wanted to make was that an LLM's ability and propensity to generate plausible falsehoods should, in my opinion, elicit a much deeper sense of distrust than one feels for an intern, enough so that comparing the two feels a little dangerous. I don't trust an intern to be right about everything, but I trust them to be self aware, and I don't feel like I have to take a magnifying glass to every tidbit of information they provide.

nothing chatgpt says is with maximum confidence. the EULA and terms of use are riddled with "no guarantee of accuracy" and "use at own risk"

No they're right. ChatGPT (and all chargers) responds confidently while making simple errors. Disclaimers upon signup or in tiny corner text are so at odds with the actual chat experience.

I think the point is that an LLM almost always responds with the appearance of high confidence. It will much quicker hallucinate than say "I don't know."

And we, as humans, are having a hard time compartmentalizing and forgetting our lifetimes of language cues, which typically correlate with attention to detail, intelligence, time investment, etc.

New echnology allows those signs to be counterfeited quickly and cheaply, and it tricks our subconscious despite our best efforts to be hyper-vigilant. (Our brains don't want to do that, it's expensive.)

Perhaps a stopgap might be to make the LLM say everything in a hostile villainous way...

They aren't talking about EULAs. It's how they give out their answers.

What I meant to say was that the model uses the verbiage of a maximally confident human. In my experience the interns worth having have some sense of the limits of their knowledge and will tell you "I don't know" or qualify information with "I'm not certain, but..."

If an intern set their Slack status to "There's no guarantee that what I say will be accurate, engage with me at your own risk." That wouldn't excuse their attempts to answer every question as if they wrote the book on the subject.

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