Technology

I tried using it to spit ball ideas for my DMing. I was running a campaign set in a real life location known for a specific thing. Even if I told it to not include that thing, it would still shoe horn it in random spots. It quickly became absolutely useless once I didn't need that thing included

Sorry for being vague, I just didn't want to post my home town on here

The issue for RPGs is that they have such "small" context windows, and a big point of RPGs is that anything could be important, investigated, or just come up later

Although, similar to how deepseek uses two stages ("how would you solve this problem", then "solve this problem following this train of thought"), you could have an input of recent conversations and a private/unseen "notebook" which is modified/appended to based on recent events, but that would need a whole new model to be done properly which likely wouldn't be profitable short term, although I imagine the same infrastructure could be used for any LLM usage where fine details over a long period are more important than specific wording, including factual things

Or at least as an assistant on a field your an expert in. Love using it for boilerplate at work (tech).

that's the core problem though, isn't it. They are just predictive text machines, not understanding what they are saying. Yet we are treating them as if they were some amazing solution to all our problems

I'll be here begging for a miserable 1 million to invest in some freaking trains and bicycle paths. Thanks.

I've found Gemini overwhelmingly terrible at pretty much everything, it responds more like a 7b model running on a home pc or a model from two years ago than a medium commercial model in how it completely ignores what you ask it and just latches on to keywords... It's almost like they've played with their tokenisation or trained it exclusively for providing tech support where it links you to an irrelevant article or something

I don’t think giving the temperature knob to end users is the answer.

Turning it to max for max correctness and low creativity won’t work in an intuitive way.

Sure, turning it down from the balanced middle value will make it more “creative” and unexpected, and this is useful for idea generation, etc. But a knob that goes from “good” to “sort of off the rails, but in a good way” isn’t a great user experience for most people.

Most people understand this stuff as intended to be intelligent. Correct. Etc. Or they At least understand that’s the goal. Once you give them a knob to adjust the “intelligence level,” you’ll have more pushback on these things not meeting their goals. “I clearly had it in factual/correct/intelligent mode. Not creativity mode. I don’t understand why it left out these facts and invented a back story to this small thing mentioned…”

Not everyone is an engineer. Temp is an obtuse thing.

But you do have a point about presenting these as cloud genies that will do spectacular things for you. This is not a great way to be executing this as a product.

I loathe how these things are advertised by Apple, Google and Microsoft.

They were actually really vague about the details. The paper itself says they used GPT-4o for ChatGPT, but apparently they didnt even note what versions of the other models were used.

Some examples of inaccuracies found by the BBC included:

Gemini incorrectly said the NHS did not recommend vaping as an aid to quit smoking

ChatGPT and Copilot said Rishi Sunak and Nicola Sturgeon were still in office even after they had left

Perplexity misquoted BBC News in a story about the Middle East, saying Iran initially showed "restraint" and described Israel's actions as "aggressive"

Not only techbros though. Most of my friends are not into computers but they all think AI is magical and will change the whole world for the better. I always ask "how can a blackbox that throws up random crap and runs on the computers of big companies out of the country would change anything?" They don't know what to say but they still believe something will happen and a program can magically become sentient. Sometimes they can be fucking dumb but I still love them.

This is my personal take. As long as you're careful and thoughtful whenever using them, they can be extremely useful.

Do you mean you rigorously went through a hundred articles, asking DeepSeek to summarise them and then got relevant experts in the subject of the articles to rate the quality of answers? Could you tell us what percentage of the summaries that were found to introduce errors then? Literally 0?

Or do you mean that you tried having DeepSeek summarise a couple of articles, didn't see anything obviously problematic, and figured it is doing fine? Replacing rigorous research and journalism by humans with a couple of quick AI prompts, which is the core of the issue that the article is getting at. Because if so, please reconsider how you evaluate (or trust others' evaluations of) information tools which might help or help destroy democracy.

I can't stand the corporate double think.

Despite the mountains of evidence that AI is not capable of something even basic as reading an article and telling you what is about it's still apparently going to replace humans. How do they come to that conclusion?

The world won't be destroyed by AI, It will be destroyed by idiot venture capitalist types who reckon that AI is the next big thing. Fire everyone, replace it all with AI; then nothing will work and nobody will be able to buy anything because nobody has a job.

Que global economic collapse.