Yeah bigger oof when you realise that nothing damn near anyone who tells anyone anything can be trusted.
Do you know how many times I’ve been handed the wrong part by “professionals” whose full time job is “parts interpreter” and their job description is to look up and order parts for customers? Or had a mechanic be “certain” about the cause of the same problem for the 3rd fucking time. The fact is that when I want to know which is the correct ecu pin for the crank angle sensor on an 83 Cordia Turbo thats some esoteric as fuck knowledge thats probably buried on a forum somewhere. If ChatGPT thinks it knows, I dont just wire shit up and send it. I get out the multimeter and I check that wire first.
Dont get me wrong, if googles search wasnt rubbish these days A.I wouldnt be as useful as it is. I had to find out who made the rear diff for a car to see if we could pull the gears out from a different make/model to get better ratios for the strip. An hour of googling just turned up every result for people selling diffs, selling diff seals, selling diffs for other cars, workshops that specialise in diffs, diff seals for other cars… Chat GPT just fucking knew it was an Aisin unit, what its part number was and then I asked "What cars is “part number” used in and it spat out a list. Its excellent because google is shit. If google was still great, it would merely be a novelty.
Tja@programming.dev 1 day ago
So same as internet forums?
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
No.
Or at least, not always. I’m in plenty of online groups with people who have shown their trustworthiness and expertise. They are people with a reputation.
Delphia@lemmy.world 1 day ago
IKR. People these days dont realise that confidently incorrect people pre-exist facebook.
If you blindly do what ChatGPT says you deserve what happens to you.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
It’s different though.
If you were a flat earther in 1982, you probably would have a weird self published “newspaper” by someone 4 times a year, and two or three books and no platform beyond literally shouting on the street at people who all considered you a moron.
Nowadays, if you’re a crackpot, you can instantly find 17.000 other crackpots who will happily not just confirm your idiocy, but make up fake stories to support your bullshit ideas. They will also drag you along by pure crank magnetism into other bullshit. You can spread your bullshit far and wide, and since people are automatically served with similar content, you’re even likely to find other idiots like you “in the wild”, which is actually an algorithmic bubble.
Before, nobody you met in real life would agree with you. Nowadays, everyone you “meet” online agrees with you.
So yes, confidently incorrect people have always been there, but not in these numbers, and rarely to this level of confidence. That’s why people react to vehemently, they rarely ever reach outside their bubble. Your ideas that the world is round aren’t the general concept to them, they hear from flat earthers every single hour of the day.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
However, this has done wonders for my atheism!
merc@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
And because crackpots like this are very engaged in their crackpottery, it’s a great place to put ads. That means that the big Internet ad companies all want to be the ones to host those bullshit ideas.
Back in the day, the reason crackpot newspapers had to be self-published is that the big publishers didn’t want to have anything to do with the crackpots. But, in the modern world, Google / Meta can find someone who wants to run an add to your crackpottery, so you get the same treatment as a big media publisher. In fact, you might get better treatment because crackpottery may be stickier than say the Boston Globe, so Google / Meta might prefer to work with you because it allows them to show more ads.
BarrelAgedBoredom@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Yeah but we automated the confidently incorrect idiot and every massive corporation is pushing the robo-idiot as a friend, confidant, tutor, assistant, and trustworthy source of accurate information. I’d rather have the confidently incorrect human than the lifeless simulacrum of one
skisnow@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Sure but (and this goes to the other person who replied with much the same thing) there’s an order of magnitude of difference going on there, plus usually when someone says something wrong on a forum others usually show up to correct them.
AI responses have so far been very clearly a step down in reliability, so don’t be treating it as a binary.
Tja@programming.dev 1 day ago
Depends on the forum, plenty of echo chambers out there…
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 1 day ago
A lot of the forums I’m seeing talked about where more technical or objective kinds. Like in a car forum there’d be repair manuals or parts lists, fountain pen forums would have loads of images comparing inks side by side for different shades and hues. Those are the sorts of knowledge centers being discussed and reminisced about a lot here.