That dissonance has a name! Gell-Mann amnesia. You aren’t alone.
It’s not that surprising that an outlet that makes its entire living on a certain segment of the economy would do a better job in that segment than generalist journalists.
If you’ve ever seen a news article about something you have real world expertise in, you know what I mean. Every time this happens to me I’m like “but they’re giving it such a surface treatment, missing the real point, and getting lots of little things wrong.”
Then I turn to the next article and read it like it’s gospel. It’s a cognitive dissonance I don’t know how to deal with except by becoming an expert in everything, which is impossible.
JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
I hate to bring up AI, but this is exactly what I keep trying to explain to people - when you ask any of these bots questions about things you’re an expert in, you see all the flaws. The trouble is people tend not to ask questions about things they already know…
pirat@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Since we first got easy access to various LLMs, I’ve been doing the opposite, asking obscure questions I know the answer to, trying to get a better understanding of what various models are really (not) capable of, and what data they’re (not) trained on, but it seems that you’re right and I’m in a minority. Most people treat the only LLM they know of as an oracle, and don’t seem to understand that it can write with confidence and still be incorrect. I’ve seen countless examples of just that, some funnier than other, so to me it has always been very obvious. It’s possible that using GPT-2 (back in the talktotransformer days), which was not configured for chat-style conversation but rather just to generate a continuation to the user’s input text, has actually helped me understand LLMs better and avoid using them in that common naive way, but I’m not sure how to make it just as clear to everyone else…
JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
What bugs me the most is I’ve pointed it out to people in conversations that basically go like this:
Me: You used it for X and caught mistakes - why are you trusting it for Y? Them: That’s a good point.
And then they keep doing it anyway.
I’m not an AI hater at all - it can be a great way to accelerate work you are capable of doing on your own. But using it for things you don’t understand, and/or not double checking its work is insanity.
ngdev@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
theyre basically just all reddit commenter summarizers imo so yeah. garbage.
SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
100%. I’m a microbiologist so I asked ChatGPT to teach me about CRISPR. It was not great.