alt Hacker News> There's something incredibly peaceful about being in the hands of an expert you trust. [...] AI can absolutely shatter that feeling in an uncomfortable way [...] but I don't know if I can fully trust AI either.
This really is key. We know we can't trust the AI, but at the same time we're also more comfortable asking the AI for clarifications or confronting it. Not having a time-bound appointment or paying by the hour helps a lot. But even then, more information doesn't necessarily help!
I once brought my 11-year-old car, a Civic with 150k miles, to multiple garages. I figured I'd play the "second opinion" game to correlate what the garages recommended to decide on what needed to be done...
I got 3 completely unrelated recommendations, including one that I knew was invalid. I felt worse off than when I started!
The solution to uncertain information isn't more information, which the AI can certainly provide, it's better information, and AI cannot currently provide that.
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I have multiple LLM subscriptions at any given time, plus an array of local models.
When I ask a question outside of my domain of expertise I like to ask all of the LLMs I have access to. I also create separate sessions and ask the same question multiple ways.
It’s revealing to see how many different and contradictory answers I get, most of which are presented confidently.
The last time I ran a medical question through Claude I couldn’t even get consistent answers between sessions.
It’s also scary how easily you can lead each LLM to the answer you have in mind. When I would start asking questions about different options that other LLMs had presented, each session would drift toward that explanation.
> The solution to uncertain information isn't more information, which the AI can certainly provide, it's better information, and AI cannot currently provide that.
I'd argue that AI _can_ currently provide that, but that it can't do it _reliably_, and that to non-experts it's impossible to differentiate, which makes it all the more dangerous.
The soothing sound of ChatGPT telling us how right and clever we are…how could it possibly hallucinate, certainly not 5.5