HedyL

joined 2 years ago
[–] HedyL@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago

FWIW, years ago, some people who worked for a political think tank approached me for expert input. They subsequently published a report that cited many of the sources I had mentioned, but their recommendations in the report were exactly the opposite of what the cited sources said (and what I had told them myself). As far as I know, there was no GenAI at the time. I think these people were simply betting that no one would check the sources.

This is not to defend the use of AI, on the contrary - I think this shows quite well what sort of people would use such tools.

[–] HedyL@awful.systems 16 points 2 weeks ago

It is admittedly only tangential here, but it recently occurred to me that at school, there are usually no demerit points for wrong answers. You can therefore - to some extent - “game” the system by doing as much guesswork as possible. However, my work is related to law and accounting, where wrong answers - of course - can have disastrous consequences. That's why I'm always alarmed when young coworkers confidently use chatbots whenever they are unable to answer a question by themselves. I guess in such moments, they are just treating their job like a school assignment. I can well imagine that this will only get worse in the future, for the reasons described here.

[–] HedyL@awful.systems 27 points 3 months ago (3 children)

In any case, I think we have to acknowledge that companies are capable of turning a whistleblower's life into hell without ever physically laying a hand on them.

[–] HedyL@awful.systems 5 points 5 months ago

I would argue that such things do happen, the cult "Heaven's Gate" probably being one of the most notorious examples. Thankfully, however, this is not a widespread phenomenon.

[–] HedyL@awful.systems 21 points 5 months ago

Yes, even some influential people at my employer have started to peddle the idea that only “old-fashioned” people are still using Google, while all the forward-thinking people are prompting an AI. For this reason alone, I think that negative examples like this one deserve a lot more attention.

[–] HedyL@awful.systems 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

From the original article:

Crivello told TechCrunch that out of millions of responses, Lindy only Rickrolled customers twice.

Yes, but how many of them received other similarly "useful" answers to their questions?