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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   32891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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I continue to be baffled that anybody takes these bots seriously, or sees Grok or xAI or their competitors as anything other than nonsense generators. A slight change to the flavour of the nonsense doesn't really change my opinion any. Perhaps it moves me in the direction of thinking that Musk is childish and temperamental, but I already thought that, so it doesn't make much difference.

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Even the best models will confidently spout absolute falsehoods every once in a while without any warning.

Buddy, have you seen humans?

As a math nerd I seriously despise this line of argument as it ultimately reduces to a fully generalized argument against "true", "false", and "accuracy" as meaningful concepts.

I don't think so. Those concepts still have pretty clear meaning and can be applied to the output of AI as well as humans. What this line of argument is disputing is the (often unstated) conclusion: "therefore, AI is not valuable." But this doesn't follow. Humans distort information, accidentally or maliciously, make errors, hallucinate, and are generally somewhat unreliable, but their output still has value. An AI can share all of those same characteristics and still be very valuable as an information processing agent.

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