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Comment by thrance | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't put too much hope on this technology bringing more good than harm to the world.

But it will bring some percentage of good and some percentage of bad. Which ain't half bad, if you ask me.

What a quip! What if it's 51% bad?

What do you do when it flags you or someone you know who's innocent? Blindly trusting these models without any verification will put innocent people in prison. Normal people don't understand why they are so confident. They're confident because they believe all the data they have is correct. I forsee a future with many faux trials because they don't understand critical thinking.

> Blindly trusting these models without any verification will put innocent people in prison.

I don't think anybody is suggesting this. But if the models can gleam information/insights that humans can't, that's still valuable, even if it's wrong some percentage of the time.

This is what happened with dna testing at the beginning. Prosecutors claimed it was x percentage accurate when in fact it was hilariously inaccurate. People thought the data was valuable when it wasn’t.

I don't see that as particularly analogous. The average person will have had LLM technology in their own hands for years, whereas with DNA it was completely foreign to them and their only choice really was to trust the experts. And on top of that DNA testing matured and is very useful now.

If you are interested in the history of pseudoscience in the courtroom and methods for deciding what should be permitted in court, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard

It is, and will continue to be, a hard problem.

If we don’t actively try to identify and implement positive use cases, then yes, it’ll definitely bring more harm than good.

Isn’t that all the more reason to call out our high hopes?

I don't know what in my comment made you think I was opposed to seeking positive applications of this technology.

From the guidelines:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Oh, we're guidelines posting?

> Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

The bad is already priced in. Nothing wrong with hoping for more good.

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