I just deleted my Reddit account of 6 years. Just found Lemmy today and joined up, this is my first post :)
Its obvious when you watch the way the LLM interacts, its tone exactly encompasses the average Reddit user and post, half-baked karma whoring … You’re absolutely right!
The fact that any AI company thought to train their LLM on the answers of Reddit users speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of their own product (IMO)
LLMs aren’t programmed to give you the correct answer. They’re programmed to give you the most pervasive/popular answer on the assumption that most of the time that will also happen to be the right one.
So when you’re getting your knowledge base from random jackasses on Reddit, where a good faith question like “What’s the best way to get get gum out of my childs hair” get’s two two good faith answers, and then a few dozen smart-ass answers that gets lots of replies and upvotes because they’re funny. Guess which one your LLM is going to use.
People (and apparently even the creators themselves) think that an LLM is actually cognizent enough to be able to weed this out logically. But it can’t. It’s not an intelligence…it’s a knowlege agreggator. And as with any aggregator, the same rule applies
garbage in, garbage out
The main thing that AI has shown, is how much bullshit we subconsciously filter through every day without much effort. (Although clearly some people struggle a lot more with distinguishing between bullshit and fact, considering how much politicized nonsense has taken hold.)
Exactly that.
If I were to google how to get gum out of my child’s hair and then be directed to that same reddit post. I’d read through it and be pretty sure which were jokes and which were serious; we make such distinctions, as you say, every day without much effort.
LLMs simply don’t have that ability. And the number of average people who just don’t get that is mind-boggling to me.
I also find it weirdly dystopian that, if you sum that up, it kind of makes it sound like in order for an LLM to make the next step towards A.I. It needs a sense of humour. It needs the ability to weed through when the information it’s digging from is serious, or just random jack-asses on the internet.
Which is turning it into a very very Star Trek problem.
What it needs most of all, is a fairly complete intuitive model of how the world works. LLMs only have book knowledge. They have no body, perception or experience. I think that’s incredibly limiting.
“How do I parallel park a car?”
AI Overview: “git gud”
Technically correct
Thats why I have stopped calling it ai. Its a dumbass buzzword just like cloud, that tech bros like to use but cant explain (or blockchain).
Its llms, and image generators/OCR (which has been around for decades), Using complex markov chains and a fuck ton of graphics cards. NOT AI. NOT AI.
It is AI, along with a bunch of optimization algorithms, statistical decision trees (probably used in adaptive AI in games), etc. AI is a field in computer science that includes a ton of things many wouldn’t consider AI.
Basically, if the solution doesn’t come from direct commands but instead comes from some form of learning process, it’s probably AI.
It’s not “general AI”, but it is in the field of AI.
I would argue we need to go back to Machine Learning.
The field is machine learning, generative machine learning etc.
This rebrand to AI is doing nothing but confusing people and building investor hype
Back? Machine Learning has always been a subfield of artificial intelligence since it all started in the 1950s or so. The end goal is to create general AI, and each field in AI is considered a piece of that puzzle, including LLMs.
Also fair.
I find the term machine learning more honest than artificial intelligence
It’s more specific, sure, but there’s nothing dishonest about using the same terminology that has been used for almost 100 years.
The disconnect is that average people have a different understanding of the term than is used in computer science, probably because of sci-fi films and whatnot. When I hear “AI,” I think of the CS term, because that’s my background, but when my family hears “AI,” they think of androids and whatnot like in Bicentennial Man.
I don’t know how to square that circle. Neither group here is wrong, but classifying something like ChatGPT as “AI,” while correct, is misinterpreted by the public, who assume it’s doing more than it is.
I use the term “inference machine”
I’ve had to start calling it AI because most people don’t know what LLMs are, and noone cares to go through the explanation, including myself.
I’m afraid that, as these things go, AI has gained a new meaning by popular use, rather than the original meaning of the acronym.
No point fighting it anymore.Maybe we just need to adjust and start saying GAI (generative ai). It has a nice ring to it too.
It’s always been like that, even since the 1950s…
If people are so dumb they dont even know what an llm is, they have no business using any “ai” products. Too bad we cant ban dumb people from using tech that will make them dumber.
Usually the third/fifth comment down is correct while the top 4 are jokes
I don’t care about their stock value but the situation fells so weird. So chatgpt refers to reddit less, and that makes reddit stock value fall. This really shows how much of the share value is pure hype and how much of “the economy” is pure manupulation of numbers instead of actual value.
The bubble bursts when one of them can’t make their monthly payment.
It’s the dot com bubble all over again
Makes me think I should sell all my retirement stocks and stick it in bonds until the bottom falls out from under Nvidia
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How decoupled stocks are from reality or value. It’s bizarre.
Tesla is “larger” than all other car companies combined when they’re virtually always “delayed” on actually shipping product. We live in bizarro world. Your livelihood is a single cell in a giant spreadsheet full of completely made-up numbers.
Tesla sells itself as a technology innovation company, but it sells hype.
The thing that baffles me on that one is that it doesn’t stand up on its own terms. None of Tesla’s tech in 2025 is ahead of its competitors, and they’ve become so toxic as a brand that most top tier engineers don’t even want to work there.
The market can stay fascist longer then you can stay solvent.
meme stocks.
That’s actually quite easy to explain. Reddits entire monetary value (or at least a very large portion) depends on how relevant it is as platform to mine user interactions - to use as training material for AI.
Reddit getting references less is a sign that the models, or the owning companies, value reddit data less compared to before.
You just described most tech stocks.
As Cory Doctrow explains:
the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will continue to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of “mature” companies.
Good. Fuck u/Spez.
Keep in mind if the Reddit stock price fell too much some hedge fund vulture would buy up a majority of the stock and then turn it into Nazi town.
Even better then. That’s how the mass migration from twitter happened.
Happy cake day
Isn’t it already basically Nazi town?
It is more disaffected people than nazis. At least the places I was at there. The site wide moderation is pretty fucked in favor of powerful interests, including Nazis however. They like to chase off real people that are driving engagement in favor of the legions of influence agents with their bot accounts.
Right, and if the moderation allows Nazi ideology to run rampant, you have a Nazi town. Especially when it’s all mostly bots spewing Nazi talking points anyway.
Refusing to fight hate speech is tantamount to supporting it.
As someone who around when shitredditsays was the bogeyman, always has been.
Just realized I was posting a reddit habit on a lemmy thread about reddit…
Nazi cucks at the moment.
News about short term falls are just click bait. Just look at Tesla
Tesla stock ups and downs seem like someone is literally gaming the system.
That’s because he is.
the fact that neither Musk nor none of his cronies ever get comeuppance for that tells you everything you need to know about the “fairness” of the “system”.
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Downvoted because this isn’t news. It’s clickbaity nonsense which has no bearing on anything real.
That’s probably why they are banning people left and right to control the content they want to put out.
Reddit be a mess, yall
Good. Nazi sympathizing shithole deserves nothing but the worst. Fuck spez and every complicit modgoloid and SSAdmin.
Modgoloid is great.
Fuck reddit.
The entire site is gpt.
Reddit is a parasite that produces nothing of value. The users are the ones keeping the site alive.
Oh well! there it is…
Does Reddit stock pay dividends or offer shareholder voting? Is most of it at least hell by their owners, giving at least a financial interest to having its value affected? Then it might as well be Yet Another Crypto Scam, in which case it isn’t really going to affect Reddit because they’ve probably already cashed out.
What people don’t realize is that the stock market is largely based off of on speculation on who’s going to buy or sell when, the articles that tie it directly to how the company performing are basically fortune tellers either telling their customers what they want to hear or catering to their customers by manipulating how their readers will behave.
People use belief in the value of money to illustrate how crypto has value. The stock market is a far better analogy, and there are plenty of confidence scams to go along with it as well.
I noticed reddit threads have “AI answers, suggestions on the bottom of every page”.
