#ai generated text

[creature-wizard]

So I've been encountering a few people who think it's a great idea to essentially treat AI (actually, language models) as some sort of oracle in their spiritual path, so I wanna mention:

An AI-generated article recently claimed that freshwater octopuses were a thing. They aren't.

AI-generated foraging books contain deadly misinformation.

Microsoft acknowledges that AI gives wrong answers all the time; defends it by saying that they're "usefully wrong." Yeah, nah, wrong is wrong.

So yeah, do not use AI to try and divine any absolute truths about anything; it literally cannot work for this function. The only thing AI can tell you about is what its datasets already contain, which very likely contains a substantial amount of misinformation and errors; and AI is more than capable of remixing accurate information into complete baloney.

[gender-trash]

Say more about Kagi? Stuff like looking for programming language documentation online has gotten so bogged down by """tutorial""" nonsense and this looks like it might be interesting.

i find that with google when i search for something i KNOW is in the official docs for the standard library usually it's like, geeks4geeks, Some Asshole's Medium Blog, etc, and then the actual official docs if present are halfway down the page. with kagi usually when i wanted the official documentation it's the first result link and geeks4geeks isn't even on the page:

(google actually didn't do so bad for this one, the official docs link was like second or third, but whatever, it's an example)

you can also turn on various... i think they're called lenses? so if i turn on the "Programming" lens for this search i get the official docs, a bunch of stackexchange links, and some github issues. if i turn on the "Forums" lens i get defaultdict-related posts on reddit and hacker news and a bunch of other random programming forums i've never heard of. you get the idea. (ooh apparently there's also a PDF lens? i have GOT to play around with this some more.)

also all of this is pretty customizable. you can turn lenses on or off and add new ones depending on what you use, or configure it to block or deprioritize certain domains:

and in the other post i mentioned fastgpt? i've never really used perplexity or any of the other "ai search engine" type things, but i use fastgpt on occasion for both programming stuff and fanfiction research stuff. it provides a nice little just-the-facts summary with citation links for everything it says. for example:

(another example from my history: 'how did edo period tailoring work'. this comes in very handy for fic research when i'm looking for something incredibly specific without many english-language sources, because unlike me it can also read japanese and therefore turn up japanese-language sources that i can plug into google translate.)

the free trial is 100 total searches; for $5/mo you get 300 searches per month and for $10/mo (the plan i'm on) you get unlimited search. personally i find it well worth the money.

[parme-san]

okay yay i'm a small and fuzzy baby otter and i need reddit threads

[unforth]

Random thought: not that there was really any doubt but now with the "chat AI knows what knotting is" thing we know 10000% that fanfic was among its training material.

There's a fuckton of fanfic.

A lot of it about detailed subjects (such as medicine and the law and police work and and and) that the authors actually know jackshit about (callout post for myself, to be clear).

Or: AI consumes millions of words of medical AU, comes out worse at medicine.

Or: in general, the equal, uncontrolled, uncritical consumption of both the inaccurate and the accurate is part of why AI is so bad at, like. (Gestures at everything).

(Also: seriously fuck the people who scrapped all our hard work without our permission.)

[heyknitebrite]

i caught COVID so i spent all evening doing this after seeing someone else on my TL link this AI and the worst part is all these generations are totally plausible metal gear plots

[hbmmaster]

[datharlequinoni]

So me and Bean over in the Spherus Reddit discord began feeding an AI text generator a bunch of absurd Bionicle prompts and we both lost our shit when it came to one in particular.

I must now grace you with this image made by Bean to commemorate this new cursed lore for Radiak.