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Comment by deegles | Hacker News Reader

not being snarky, but what is the point of using the model if you already know enough to correct it into giving the right answer?

an example that just occurred to me - if you asked it to generate an image of a mushroom that is safe to eat in your area, how would you tell it it was wrong? "oh, they never got back to me, I'll generate this image for others as well!"

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A common use of these models is asking for code, and maybe you don't know the answer or would take a while to figure it out. For example, here's some html, make it blue and centered. You could give the model feedback on if its answer worked or not, without knowing the correct answer yourself ahead of time.

I was using llama3 and deepseek-r1 literally to center an element in a div and they were not able to despite many prompts and variations. I guess I figured it out in the end but I'm not convinced I saved any time vs just carefully reading flexbox docs.

You constantly have to correct an AI when using it because it either didn't get the question right or you guide him towards a more narrowed answer. There is only more to learn.

>not being snarky, but what is the point of using the model if you already know enough to correct it into giving the right answer?

For your example, what if you want to show what such a mushroom looks like to a friend? What if you want to use it on a website?

I feel like conventional image search would be more reliable to get a good picture of a mushroom variety that you know about. Ideally going out into the woods to get one I suppose.

On topics like history or biology if a model's answer is surprising I might check Wikipedia and call it out on it's bullshit by explaining how Wikipedia contradicts it and pasting an excerpt from Wikipedia. But frankly if the model can't even reliably internalize Wikipedia I don't have much hope for complex feedback training based on my chats.

While it's possible Wikipedia is wrong, the model always agrees with me when I correct it, so that isn't going to help with training either.

Of course for anything high stakes relying on a model probably isn't a great idea.

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