this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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I think it's worse when they get it right only some of the time. It's not a matter of opinion, it should not change its "mind".
The fucking things are useless for that reason, they're all just guessing, literally.
It's not literally guessing, because guessing implies it understands there's a question and is trying to answer that question. It's not even doing that. It's just generating words that you could expect to find nearby.
Even if you retooled the LLM to not randomize the output it generates, it can still create contradictory outputs based on a slightly reworded question. I'm talking about a misspelling, different punctuation, things that simply wouldn't cause a person to change their answer.
(And that's assuming the LLM just got started from scratch. If you had any previous conversation with it, it could have influenced the output as well. It's such a mess.)
Is cruise control useless because it doesn't drive you to the grocery store? No. It's not supposed to. It's designed to maintain a steady speed - not to steer.
Large Language Models, as the name suggests, are designed to generate natural-sounding language - not to reason. They're not useless - we're just using them off-label and then complaining when they fail at something they were never built to do.
Language without meaning is garbage. Like, literal garbage, useful for nothing. Language is a tool used to express ideas, if there are no ideas being expressed then it's just a combination of letters.
Which is exactly why LLMs are useless.
800 million weekly ChatGPT users disagree with that.
And there are 1.3 billion smokers in the world according to the WHO.
Does that make cigarettes useful?
Something being useful doesn't imply it's good or beneficial. Those terms are not synonymous. Usefulness describes whether a thing achieves a particular goal or serves a specific purpose effectively.
A torture device is useful for extracting information. A landmine is useful for denying an area to enemy troops.
No it fucking isn't! This is a great analogy, actually, thank you for bringing it up. A person being tortured will tell you literally anything that they believe will stop you from torturing them. They will confess to crimes that never happened, tell you about all their accomplices who don't exist, and all their daily schedules that were made up on the spot. Torture is useless but morons think it is useful. Just like AI.
Torture can be a useful way of extracting information if you have a way to instantly verify it, which actually makes it a good analogy to LLMs. If I want to know the password to your laptop and torture you until you give me the correct password and I log in then that works.
If you can instantly verify it then you don't need the torture.
Getting the person to volunteer the information is proven to be far, far more successful and being able to instantly verofy means you know when you have the answers.
In fact it cannot ever be a useful way of extracting information. Even just randomly guessing is a better way to get the information you want than torture.
I'm not saying its anything other than morally repugnant, obviously, but in the example of a password with billions or trillions of combinations and where you can check the answers given torture pretty obviously is better than guessing.
That's not a scenario that is ever likely to come up, and wouldn't be justifiable even if it did, but pretending it wouldnt be effective is ridiculous.
Those users are being harmed by it, not benefited. That isn't useful, it's a social disease.
But natural language in service of what? If they can't produce answers that are correct, what's the point of using them? I can get wrong answers anywhere.
As OP said, LLMs are really good at generating text that is fluid and looks natural to us. So if you want that kind of output, LLMs are the way to go.
Not all LLM prompts ask factual questions and not all of the generated answers need to be correct.
Are poems, songs, stories or movie scripts 'correct'?
I'm totally against shoving LLMs everywhere, but they do have their uses. They are really good at this one thing.
It's a valid point that they can produce natural language. The Turing Test has been a thing for awhile after all. But while the language sounds natural, can they create anything meaningful? Are the poems or stories they make worth anything? It's not like humans don't create shitty art, so I guess generating random soulless crap is similar to that.
The value of language produced by something that can't understand the reason for language is an interesting question I suppose.
I'm with you on that. I've come to realize that I value a shitty stick figure that was drawn by a human much more than an AI generated 'Mona Lisa'.
There are people out there whose job is to format promotional emails for companies. AIs can replace this kind of soulless work completely. We should applaud that.
No, we don't need to applaud automation of spam.
Some of them can produce the correct answer. Of we do the test next year and they do better than humans then, isn't it progress?
I'm not here defending the practical value of these models. I'm just explaining what they are and what they're not.
You're definitely running around Lemmy defending AI, Iconoclast... Might as well be honest about it
I'm not really interested in engaging in discussions about what you or anyone else thinks my underlying motives are. You're free to point out any factual inaccuracies in my responses, but there's no need to make it personal and start accusing me of being dishonest.
Your motivations are self-evident, I'm just pointing them out because you are misrepresenting them here
Same takeaway as the article (everyone read the article, right?).
Applying it to yourself, can you recall instances when you were asked the same question at different points in time? How did you respond?
Having read the article (you read the article right?) what gave you the impression the AI was asked the question at different points in time?
The AI was asked the same question repeatedly and gave different answers, due to its randomised structure.
People will also often do this (I have, personally), but because our actions seem to be strongly influenced by time-dependent stuff (like sense perception and short-term memory contents), I'd expect you'd need to ask at different times.
My answer to this question will not change if you ask me a year from now, because as OP said this is not a matter of opinion; there is a factually correct answer.
vibeslop type comment bruh
Good talk, great contribution.