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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1232 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 7, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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So I know a lot of posters here are doing some really advanced stuff with AI, but I have a quick little anecdote from my own luddite life that might help explain why most normies don't really see AI as something particularly useful.

I just asked Google's free AI what the current value of 0.035 ounces of gold is and it completely face-planted, ignoring the decimal and the zero and giving me the value for 35 ounces. This isn't a case of overactive guardrails or confusing syntax or hallucinating plausible details into a news story; it's the most basic of transcription errors, the kind that dumb, pre-LLM systems have solved for decades. Old google never would have made such an error.

This is the technology that's going to completely upend the world order? It makes sense for normies to be skeptical. Regardless of what the frontier labs have cooking, the AI most people actually interact with is worse than useless half the time.

Anybody else have one of these "the fuck are we even doing here?" moments with AI recently?

I get them every single time I use one for anything subjective or creative. I suspect LLMs are a dead end. The comprehension of prose is terrible, their ideas are terrible and wishy-washy, and the naked glazing disgusts me.

I suppose that biological neural networks were ultimately evolved in the same way; throwing them at a task (survival) over and over and over until they accomplished it, then iterating. It's why our brains arent truth-seeking machines, but survival machines, and even our sensory perceptions are a cobbled together mess of imaginary qualia and we see Shadow-Men and optical illusions.

Instead, these things are trained on convincing a human that the output pleases them; any accuracy or usefulness is ultimately incidental.

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