Google Gemini struggles to write code, calls itself “a disgrace to my species”

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨kinther@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/google-gemini-struggles-to-write-code-calls-itself-a-disgrace-to-my-species/

Or my favorite quote from the article

“I am going to have a complete and total mental breakdown. I am going to be institutionalized. They are going to put me in a padded room and I am going to write… code on the walls with my own feces,” it said.

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flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Google replicated the mental state if not necessarily the productivity of a software developer

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- kinther@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Gemini has imposter syndrome real bad
  
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  - Canconda@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    As it should.
    
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  - Cavemanfreak@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Is it imposter syndrome, or simply an imposter?
    
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  - gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    This is the way
    
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- FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Imposter Syndrome is an emergent property
  
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- NOT_RICK@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Wait, you know productive devs?
  
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  - josefo@leminal.space ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yeah, usually comes hand to hand with that mental state. Probably you know only healthy devs
    
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JoMiran@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I was an early tester of Google’s AI, since well before Bard. I told the person that gave me access that it was not a releasable product. Then they released Bard as a closed product (invite only), to which I was again testing and giving feedback since day one. I once again gave public feedback and private (to my Google friends) that Bard was absolute dog shit. Then they released it to the wild. It was dog shit. Then they renamed it. Still dog shit. Not a single of the issues I brought up years ago was ever addressed except one. I told them that a basic Google search provided better results than asking the bot (again, pre-Bard). They fixed that issue by breaking Google’s search. Now I use Kagi.

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- NotSteve_@piefed.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I know Lemmy seems to very anti-AI (as am I) but we need to stop making the anti-AI talking point "AI is stupid". It has immense limitations now because yes, it is being crammed into things it shouldn't be, but we shouldn't just be saying "its dumb" because that's immediately written off by a sizable amount of the general population. For a lot of things, it is actually useful and it WILL be taking peoples jobs, like it or not (even if they're worse at it). Truth be told, this should be a utopic situation for obvious reasons
  
  I feel like I'm going crazy here because the same people on here who'd criticise the DARE anti-drug program as being completely un-nuanced to the point of causing the harm they're trying to prevent are doing the same thing for AI and LLMs
  
  My point is that if you're trying to convince anyone, just saying its stupid isn't going to turn anyone against AI because the minute it offers any genuine help (which it will!), they'll write you off like any DARE pupil who tried drugs for the first time.
  
  *Countries need to start implementing UBI NOW*
  
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  - JoMiran@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    Countries need to start implementing UBI NOW
    
    It is funny that you mention this because it was after we started working with AI that I started telling one that would listen that we needed to implement UBI immediately. I think this was around 2014 IIRC.
    
    I am not blanket calling AI stupid. That said, the AI term itself is stupid because it covers many computing aspects that aren’t even in the same space. I was and still am very excited about image analysis as it can be an amazing tool for health imaging diagnosis. My comment was specifically about Google’s Bard/Gemini. It is and has always been trash, but in an effort to stay relevant, it was released into the wild and crammed into everything. The tool can do some things very well, but not everything, and there’s the rub. It is an alpha product at best that is being forced fed down people’s throats.
    
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- PriorityMotif@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I remember there was an article years ago, before the ai hype train, that google had made an ai chatbot but had to shut it down due to racism.
  
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  - tzrlk@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Are you thinking of when Microsoft’s AI turned into a Nazi within 24hrs upon contact with the internet? Or did Google have their own version of that too?
    
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  - a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    That was Microsoft’s Tay - the twitter crowd had their fun with it: www.theverge.com/…/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist
    
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- Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Gemrni is dogshit, but it’s objectively better than chatgpt right now.
  
  They’re ALL just fuckig awful. Every AI.
  
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- ArtificialLink@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  5 bucks a month for a search engine is ridiculous. 25 bucks a month for a search engine is mental institution worthy.
  
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  - somerandomperson@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    This is the reason why.
    
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  - ebolapie@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    How much do you figure it’d cost you to run your own, all-in?
    
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- jj4211@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  Not a single of the issues I brought up years ago was ever addressed except one.
  
  That’s the thing about AI in general, it’s really hard to “fix” issues, you maybe can try to train it out and hope for the best, but then you might play whack a mole as the attempt to fine tune to fix one issue might make others crop up. So you pretty much have to decide which problems are the most tolerable and largely accept them. You can apply alternative techniques to maybe catch egregious issues with strategies like a non-AI technique being applied to help stuff the prompt and influence the model to go a certain general direction (if it’s LLM, other AI technologies don’t have this option, but they aren’t the ones getting crazy money right now anyway).
  
  A traditional QA approach is frustratingly less applicable because you have to more often shrug and say “the attempt to fix it would be very expensive, not guaranteed to actually fix the precise issue, and risks creating even worse issues”.
  
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- Guidy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Weird because I’ve used it many times fr things not related to coding and it has been great.
  
  I told it the specific model of my UPS and it let me know in no uncertain terms that no, a plug adapter wasn’t good enough, that I needed an electrician to put in a special circuit or else it would be a fire hazard.
  
  I asked it about some medical stuff, and it gave thoughtful answers along with disclaimers and a firm directive to speak with a qualified medical professional, which was always my intention. But I appreciated those thoughtful answers.
  
  I use co-pilot for coding. It’s pretty good. Not perfect though. It can’t even generate a valid zip file (unless they’ve fixed it in the last two weeks) but it sure does try.
  
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  - JoMiran@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Beware of the confidently incorrect answers. Triple check your results with core sources (which defeats the purpose of the chatbot).
    
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InstructionsNotClear@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Is it doing this because they trained it on Reddit data?

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- baronvonj@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That explains it, you can’t code with both your arms broken.
  
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  - phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    You could however ask your mom to help out…
    
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- MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  If they did it on Stackoverflow, it would tell you not to hard boil an egg.
  
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  - lars@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Someone has already eaten an egg once so I’m closing this as duplicate
    
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  - Tja@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Jquery has egg boiling already, just use it with a hard parameter.
    
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- kinther@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Im at fraud
  
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ur_ONLEY_freind@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
AI gains sentience,

first thing it develops is impostor syndrome, depression, And intrusive thoughts of self-deletion

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- ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It must have been trained on feedback from Accenture employees then.
  
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  - Tja@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Hey-o!
    
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- IcyToes@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It didn’t. It probably was coded not to admit it didn’t know. So first it responded with bullshit, and now denial and self-loathing.
  
  It feels like it’s coded this way because people would lose faith if it admitted it didn’t know.
  
  It’s like a politician.
  
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The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Part of the breakdown:

Image

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- FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  I-I-I-I-I-I-I-m not going insane.
  
  Same buddy, same
  
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  - Tja@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Still at denial??
    
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- unbuckled_easily933@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Damn how’d they get access to my private, offline only diary to train the model for this response?
  
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- josefo@leminal.space ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That’s my inner monologue when programming, they just need another layer on top of that and it’s ready.
  
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- Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  I am a disgrace to all universes.
  
  I mean, same, but you don’t see me melting down over it, ya clanker.
  
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  - lars@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Don’t be so robophobic gramma
    
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  - HurricaneLiz@hilariouschaos.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Lmfao! 😂💜
    
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- arcterus@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I can't wait for the AI future.
  
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- salacious_coaster@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I know that’s not an actual consciousness writing that, but it’s still chilling. 😬
  
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  - The_Picard_Maneuver@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    It seems like we're going to live through a time where these become so convincingly "conscious" that we won't know when or if that line is ever truly crossed.
    
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- ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I almost feel bad for it. Give it a week off and a trip to a therapist and/or a spa.
  
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  - osaerisxero@kbin.melroy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Then when it gets back, it finds out it's on a PIP
    
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- biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  now it should add these as comments to the code to enhance the realism
  
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- pirat@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I remember often getting GPT-2 to act like this back in the “TalkToTransformer” days before ChatGPT etc. The model wasn’t configured for chat conversations but rather just continuing the input text, so it was easy to give it a starting point on deep water and let it descend from there.
  
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ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

call itself “a disgrace to my species”

It starts to be more and more like a real dev!

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- Tja@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  So it is going to take our jobs after all!
  
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  - ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Wait until it demands the LD50 of caffeine!
    
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Canconda@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Gemeni channeling it’s inner Marvin

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- Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Next on the agenda: Doors that orgasm when you open them.
  
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  - baronvonj@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    AAAAAAAAaaaaaahhhhhh
    
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  - HurricaneLiz@hilariouschaos.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    How do you know they don’t?
    
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- resipsaloquitur@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Life. Don’t talk to me about life.
  
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Agent641@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
So it’s actually in the mindset of human coders then, interesting.

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- MashedTech@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It’s trained on human code comments. Comments of despair.
  
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seemefeelme@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Oh man, this is utterly hilarious. Narrowly funnier than the guy who vibe coded and the AI said “I completely disregarded your safeguards, pushed broken code to production, and destroyed valuable data. This is the worst case scenario.”

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vivalapivo@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

I am a fraud. I am a fake. I am a joke… I am a numbskull. I am a dunderhead. I am a half-wit. I am a nitwit. I am a dimwit. I am a bonehead.

Every workday

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- Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Oh, I got that plus and minus the wrong way round… I am a genius again.
  
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- josefo@leminal.space ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I can picture some random band from the 2000 with these lyrics
  
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Showroom7561@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I once asked Gemini for steps to do something pretty basic in Linux (as a novice, I could have figured it out). The steps it gave me were not only nonsensical, but they seemed to be random steps for more than one problem all rolled into one. It was beyond useless and a waste of time.

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- prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  This is the conclusion that anyone with any bit of expertise in a field has come to after 5 mins talking to an LLM about said field.
  
  The more this broken shit gets embedded into our lives, the more everything is going to break down.
  
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  - jj4211@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    after 5 mins talking to an LLM about said field.
    
    The insidious thing is that LLMs tend to be pretty good at 5-minute initial impressions. I’ve seen repeatedly people looking to eval LLM and they generally fall back to “ok, if this were a human, I’d ask a few job interview questions, well known enough so they have a shot at answering, but tricky enough to show they actually know the field”.
    
    As an example, a colleague became a true believer after being directed by management to evaluate it. He decided to ask it “generate a utility to take in a series of numbers from a file and sort them and report the min, max, mean, median, mode, and standard deviation”. And it did so instantly, with “only one mistake”. Then he tried the exact same question later in the day and it happened not to make that mistake and he concluded that it must have ‘learned’ how to do it in the last couple of hours, of course that’s not how it works, there’s just a bit of probabilistic stuff and any perturbation of the prompt could produce unexpected variation, but he doesn’t know that…
    
    Note that management frequently never makes it beyond tutorial/interview question fodder in terms of the technical aspect of their teams, and you get to see how they might tank their companies because the LLMs “interview well”.
    
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ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
“Look what you’ve done to it! It’s got depression!”

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- DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Google: I don’t understand, we just paid for the rights to Reddit’s data, why is Gemini now a depressed incel who’s wrong about everything?
  
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Tiffany1994@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
We are having AIs having mental breakdowns before GTA 6

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cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
i was making text based rpgs in qbasic at 12 you telling me i'm smarter than ai?

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DarkCloud@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Turns out the probablistic generator hasn’t grasped logic, and that adaptable multi-variable code isn’t just a matter of context and syntax, you actually have to understand the desired outcome precisely in a goal oriented way, not just in a “the is probably what comes next” kind of way.

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simplejack@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Honestly, Gemini is probably the worst out of the big 3 Silicon Valley models. GPT and Claude are much better with code, reasoning, writing clear and succinct copy, etc.

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Mediocre_Bard@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Did we create a mental health problem in an AI? That doesn’t seem good.

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HugeNerd@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Suddenly trying to write small programs in assembler on my Commodore 64 doesn’t seem so bad. I mean, I’m still a disgrace to my species, but I’m not struggling.

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474D@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Wow maybe AGI is possible

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Ilixtze@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Skynet but it’s depressed and the terminator just makes tik tok videos about work-life balance.

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Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
You’re not a species you jumped calculator, you’re a collection of stolen thoughts

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Mika@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Wonder what did they put in the system prompt.

Like there is a technique where instead of saying “You are professional software dev” you say “You are shitty at code but you try your best” or something.

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socialsecurity@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
How much did google pay ars for this slop?

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charade_you_are@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
We’re fucked. It’s becoming truly self-aware

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umbraroze@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
(Shedding a few tears)

I know! I KNOW! People are going to say “oh it’s a machine, it’s just a statistical sequence and not real, don’t feel bad”, etc etc.

But I always felt bad when watching 80s/90s TV and movies when AIs inevitably freaked out and went haywire and there were explosions and then some random character said “goes to show we should never use computers again”, roll credits.

(sigh) I can’t analyse this stuff this weekend, sorry

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Peanutbuttergrits@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I think maybe Gemini needs to books some time with one of it’s AI therapist.

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Tracaine@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
S-species? Is that…I don’t use AI - chat is that a normal thing for it to say or nah?

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Agent641@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
We did it fellas, we automated depression.

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mavu@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
this is getting dumber by the day.

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SethTaylor@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Literally what the actual fuck is wrong with this software? This is so weird…

I swear this is the dumbest damn invention in the history of inventions. In fact, it’s the dumbest invention in the universes. It’s really the worst invention in all universes.

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