alt Hacker NewsPeople make these mistakes too. Several times in my high school shop class kids shorted out 9V batteries trying to build circuits because they didn't understand how electronics work. At no point did our teacher stop them from doing so - on at least one occasion I unplugged one from a breadboard before it got too toasty to handle (and I was/am an electronics nublet). Similarly there was also a lot of hand-wringing about the Gemini pizza glue in a world where people do wacky stuff like cook fish in a dishwasher or defrost chicken overnight on the counter or put cooked steak on the same plate it was on when raw just a few minutes prior.
LLMs are just surfacing the fact that assessing and managing risk is an acquired, difficult-to-learn skill. Most people don't know what they don't know and fail to think about what might happen if they do something (correctly or otherwise) before they do it, let alone what they'd do if it goes wrong.
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What's your point?
The AI is being sold as an expert, not a student. These are categorically different things.
The mistake in the post is one that can be avoided by taking a single class at a community college. No PhD required, not even a B.S., not even an electricians certificate.
So I don't get your point. You're comparing a person in a learning environment to the equivalent of a person claiming to have a PhD in electrical engineering. A student letting the magic smoke escape from a basic circuit is a learnable experience (a memorable one that has high impact), especially when done in a learning environment where an expert can ensure more dangerous mistakes are less likely or non existent. But the same action from a PhD educated engineer would make you reasonably question their qualifications. Yes, humans make mistakes but if you follow the AI's instructions and light things on fire you get sued. If you follow the engineer's instructions and set things on fire then that engineer gets fired likely loses their license.
So what is your point?
Well said, but I'd add that LLMs are also surfacing the fact that there's a swathe of people out there who will treat the machines as more trustworthy than humans by default, and don't believe they need to do any assessment or risk management in the first place.