this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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Artificial Generalized Incompetence

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[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 1 points 1 hour ago

Probably one of Musk's little goons was given the task, and they immediately went to ChatGPT.

[–] TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 115 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I mean, I'm not going to spend time trying to duplicate their results, but it wouldn't even slightly surprise me. Cops have been using ChatGPT to streamline their bullshit cop-lingo incident reports, to the extent that it's caught the notice of lawyers and judges... 100% I believe that the dolts who shit out Trump's tariff rates used it too.

[–] hansolo@lemm.ee 23 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There's a ton of papers on Google Scholar that still include phases like "Let's delve into..." That show otnwas used not to translate, but for the research itself.

And someone did replicate this, and ChatGPT 4o, o1, Claude and Grok all came up with the same formula for an "easy" way to calculate tariffs.

[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 153 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The United States of America. A nation ruled by word salad.

[–] furzegulo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 66 points 2 days ago (3 children)

and a man, who has never had salad in his entire life!

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 1 points 1 hour ago

And that's not lettuce, it's horseshit.

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 21 points 2 days ago (3 children)

There's lettuce on his Big Mac!

[–] RampageDon@lemm.ee 12 points 2 days ago

Yea but he takes the gross green stuff off because children don't like greens, duh.

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[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago

if he chops up his hamburgers into pieces it counts

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 14 points 2 days ago

BUY A TESLER

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 124 points 2 days ago (6 children)

How about the outlet checks and finds out?

I did, and I couldn’t get low-temperature Gemini or a local LLM to replicate it, and not all the tariffs seem to be based on the trade deficit ratio, though some suspiciously are.

Sorry, but this is a button of mine, outlets that ask stupidly easy to verify questions but dont even try. No, just cite people on Reddit and Twitter…

[–] reiterationstation@lemm.ee 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

They tariffed places with no people in them.

[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 33 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

though some suspiciously are.

Some? A huge portion are. Numerous others have replicated it with visual proof. I agree that the news sites should be verifying it, but NYT did and also documented their proof.

[–] TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] Fogle@lemmy.ca 24 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Appears to be that calculation minimum of 10%

[–] Obi@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Am I still going crazy or what, trade deficit =/= tariffs right??

[–] Womble@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

No you're not going crazy, you just understand economics and trade more than the President of the USA.

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[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 23 points 2 days ago (2 children)

That bothers me too. Get an actual expert source to verify before you publish shit from randos on Twitter and Reddit.

[–] drislands@lemmy.world 13 points 2 days ago

"several X users claim", they say for sources. Christ Almighty.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

In this case, it's as simple as "type it into ChatGPT, like the Reddit users did" :/

[–] MyNameIsIgglePiggle@sh.itjust.works 22 points 2 days ago (1 children)

"these lazy fucks in the government are using ai to come up with policy"

Also news outlet

"I am too lazy to do the laziest thing I'm angry about, even though it's my literal job"

[–] Yoga@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 days ago

"News outlet" is a huge stretch. It's a crypto currency blog pretending to be news.

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

But that doesn't confirm or deny that Trumps formula came from ChatGPT, they could both be drawing from some other source.

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[–] Grostleton@lemm.ee 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Because the article is likely just more GenAI vomit, and an LLM doesn't have any degree of deductive reasoning ability to begin with.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

TBH it's probably human written.

I used to write small articles for a tech news outlet on the side (HardOCP), and the entire site went under well before the AI boom because no one can compete with conveyer belts of of thoughtless SEO garbage, especially when Google promotes it.

Point being, this was a problem well before the rise of LLMs.

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[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 30 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

what if they all come up with that because it has been publicised and they just refer to that because they have nothing else to base the questions about that specific topic on?

I just glanced at it and wouldnt know how something like that is even supposed to be, so I dont really know how unhinged the tariff rate thing is. It wouldnt surprise me if it was based only to whatever happened to be going through the madmans mind at the time.

[–] kyle@lemm.ee 13 points 2 days ago (3 children)

The numbers come from an overly simple way to level out trade deficits.

So if I sell you $100 in goods and you sell me $120 dollars in goods, I'm "losing" money, therefore 20% tariff (tax to sell me something). In reality, you're going to increase your prices and sell me $140 worth of the same stuff.

All the AIs did was expand this to a global scale, what's insane to me is that the math adds up. It doesn't take an AI to do this though, some economics undergrad could come up with the same thing. Understanding the underlying methodology shows how it completely lacks nuance or understanding of how the world really works.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 1 points 1 hour ago

what’s insane to me is that the math adds up

Too bad it's based on wrong assumptions. It's not the arithmetic that's the issue, it's the model.

some economics undergrad could come up with the same thing

And if they did it on a test, they'd flunk it.

Understanding the underlying methodology shows how it completely lacks nuance or understanding of how the world really works.

Yeah, it fails to understand the rationale for comparative advantage (there's a reason Ecuador exports more bananas than Norway does), and it also fails to consider the balance-of-payments effect of things like foreign direct investment (which looks zero-sum when it first takes place but means the profits are outflows from that point on, unless the foreign investors choose to reinvest them).

Also I don't think the idiots who came up with that table know the difference between a current account balance and balance of trade.

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[–] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago

Yeah, this makes sense to me. ChatGPT isn't crunching the numbers, looking at conservative ideology, foreign policy goals and media optics before recommending the ideal number for the trump admin to implement. Instead it's just looking for the most widely publicized set of numbers in relation to that query and regurgitating that.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (3 children)

what if they all come up with that because it has been publicised

Then I'd ask who published and where they got their analysis from. Very possible that we've got an AI that's built up a backlog of Harvard Business Studies and CalTech economics models to reach the ideal hypothetical tariff regime. But it's just as likely they're ingesting 4chan reposts of Ron Paul Newsletters and Michael Savage radio transcripts to build up its economic background.

That's sort of the problem with AI. There's no specialist-driven guidance on what data is valuable and what data is crap. No litmus test to separate fact from fiction or serious discussion versus trolling. And these western developed models, in particular, are very bad about including the origins of their graphed logical output (because that would make the process of hashing and graphing more expensive, in a system that's already inelegant and resource intensive).

I just glanced at it and wouldnt know how something like that is even supposed to be, so I dont really know how unhinged the tariff rate thing is.

The problem is less that we don't know how bad the tariff rate is and more that the people designing the policies don't know either. They're fishing for answers in the answer pond, and they don't even know if they've got a fish or a boot at the end of the line.

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Very possible that we’ve got an AI that’s built up a backlog of Harvard Business Studies and CalTech economics models to reach the ideal hypothetical tariff regime.

Possible but vastly improbable. And since when has CalTech been into econometric modeling? Last time I checked, they only did engineering and real science.

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[–] elfin8er@lemmy.world 24 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Did ChatGPT come up with the color of the sky? AI chatbots ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok all return the same color for the sky, several X users claim.

[–] sun_is_ra@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Yea but we can all agree on sky color but the numbers Trump posted are questionable at best

[–] futatorius@lemm.ee 1 points 1 hour ago

the numbers Trump posted are questionable at best

I'm less diplomatic: the numbers that Trump posted are flagrant bullshit.

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[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

The sky color is part of the training data. How did the LLMs include the training data before it existed?

[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

All the search engines search the same internet, find similar text, output it using similar formulas.

[–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 29 points 2 days ago (9 children)

Except these AI systems aren't search engines, and people treating them like they are is really dangerous

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[–] Boxscape@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)
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