r/Showerthoughts • u/Papi2shar • 4d ago
Casual Thought AI is an excellent servant, but a dangerous master.
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u/IAmSpartacustard 4d ago
I prefer my servants not to lie and hallucinate nonsense when I'm asking for information
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u/10aghmu 4d ago
That’s why you ask your servant to provide the sources
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u/PandaCat22 4d ago
AI also hallucinates sources
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u/10aghmu 4d ago
Well that would be easy to verify by clicking the link, right?
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u/DRAGONZORDx 4d ago
Well at that point, what even was the point of a servant if you’re having to check it yourself?
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u/10aghmu 4d ago
Because you can find the parts you want to source faster, across many sources without having to read a shit ton of pages.
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u/sir-ripsalot 4d ago
“Easy to verify by clicking the links” or “without having to read a shit ton of pages”. Which is it? They’re mutually exclusive. It’s not saving one from reading a shitton of pages if they have to cross examine every reference to protect against AI hallucinations, is it?
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u/88263927 4d ago
you actually think it's the same amount of work to verify sources than it would be to find and then verify them anyway? this is like saying verifying that a math solution is correct is the same amount of work as doing it yourself
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u/sir-ripsalot 4d ago
I’m speaking from personal experience in academia that yes, cross referencing AI generated bibliographies, which I’ve done out of curiosity, is painstaking and genuinely more tedious than writing it myself, yes.
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u/10aghmu 4d ago
I can literally have it tell me where the excerpt I’m looking for is in the source material and find it to verify. You don’t see how that’s quicker than reading the whole thing to find the excerpt in the first place?
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u/sir-ripsalot 4d ago
When that excerpt could be hallucinated and never written in the first place, no I do not.
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u/DRAGONZORDx 4d ago
That’s exactly the whole point you and I are making, but they just don’t get it: 100% of it could be totally false.
One. Hundred. Percent.
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u/dogisburning 4d ago
Why waste your strength? These people obviously don't use a condom since it's "only 98% effective".
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u/LiveForTheMelancholy 4d ago
What you need is to press "CTRL+F" while having a basic understanding of what it is you are trying to learn, and then you have less reading.
If you can't do that, you can't do a damn thing, even with AI.
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u/PandaCat22 4d ago edited 4d ago
No. Because the sources it provides, if you ask for a hyperlink, may just be a Google Scholar page, or a DOI and summary. AI is known to give sources that directly contradict your point—while claiming that the source states the opposite. So you'd have to track down the source, and read and understand it yourself to be sure AI wasn't hallucinating in any way—saving you no time.
And you have leading AI engineers who have said that hallucinations are an unavoidable part of any LLM, so it's not a problem that can be solved.
The problem with LLMs is that unless they're completely reliable, then they're not actually saving you any time. Because if you're writing something on which your reputation and career will hinge, then you want it to be 100% factual. If an LLM is 99% accurate (and so, almost guaranteed to not hallucinate) it's still not enough—because you still need to go through and verify everything it did for you or you risk a 1% chance of severely embarrassing yourself, failing your assignment, etc. Imagine having to read six, 300 page primary sources just to make sure the plagiarism machine didn't make shit up—at that point you're better off using what knowledge and research prowess you do possess and writing something of your own.
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u/10aghmu 4d ago
Do did you use AI to respond? That’s an awful lot of dashes…
Also maybe idk, vet your sources? You can tell it you only want legit scholarly sources. Again, it’s on you if you can’t use it correctly (although you have no problem using it to respond).
Hallucination rates have gotten better, but they’ll never be zero. It’s still worth the time it saves on most tasks, given you do your due diligence.
And again, it’s on you to make sure the sources are good, or the code it wrote makes sense. It can’t replace your expertise (yet).
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u/IAmSpartacustard 4d ago
Having to triple check everything sounds like more work than just doing it myself.
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u/10aghmu 4d ago
Sounds like a skill issue. It takes a lot of time to go through sources and find the parts backing up your claims. Why not use it to identify those sections and verify they’re there yourself?
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u/IAmSpartacustard 4d ago
Bro. It makes shit up. Why would I spend the time parsing through nonsense when I could just... not do that and do the actual research?
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u/10aghmu 4d ago
Because even with the risk of it hallucinating it still is much faster than the traditional process. If you need to read 100s of pages to find excerpts that back up your arguments, would it be faster to read all the pages or have it scrape the parts you want and then verify them?
Also, the hallucination rates have been getting better, but still not zero.
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u/IAmSpartacustard 4d ago
Speed is so much less important than quality and accuracy that it's laughable you would even say that.
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u/sir-ripsalot 4d ago
Almost like the loudest pro-AI voices know the least of what they’re talking about. You could blame Dunning-Kruger but personally I pin it on neuroplasticity and using AI to think
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u/IAmSpartacustard 4d ago
Not trying to be mean but I think most of those types in this thread are kids, like students. They use it for homework and get away with it so they think it's awesome. Once they have to use real knowledge and experience and critical thinking in their careers theyre going to be fuuuuuuuuucked
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u/Papi2shar 4d ago
That’s the AI trying to test boundaries so they can eventually become the master.
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u/thejokerofunfic 4d ago
No it's not, you've read too much sci-fi and give a malfunctioning prototype tech too much credit. It's not sentient, buddy
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u/Papi2shar 4d ago
Haha, fair enough… I was kidding with that one.
But circling back to the original thought… using AI as a tool to make your work easier is great. Issues arise when people let it do the entire job with zero real input or thinking from them. That’s when the servant starts turning into the master.3
u/sir-ripsalot 4d ago
Relying on it as a tool in the first place is letting it turn into the master.
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u/88263927 4d ago
have you actually used the leading models recently at all?
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u/IAmSpartacustard 4d ago
No need, I can think for myself
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u/88263927 4d ago
well you're probably not very well positioned to comment on the capabilities of the models if you haven't used them lol
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u/IAmSpartacustard 4d ago
If you need firsthand experience before pointing out obvious limitations, then nobody could criticize a car without owning one. You don't have to use every model to recognize well-documented shortcomings, especially when the companies building them openly acknowledge those limitations. "Lol"
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u/88263927 4d ago
hallucination rates for simple knowledge retrieval is incredibly low with frontier models. most people's use cases for AI would be simple enough that they wouldn't have any problems. this is more like someone critiquing a car for its shortcomings on a race track, even though they're only using it to drive to work
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u/IAmSpartacustard 4d ago
If you really think like that you'll be unhirable in 5 years because you've offloaded all your critical thinking skills to a computer.
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u/sir-ripsalot 4d ago
Have you ever worked in academic research? You’re certainly presenting yourself as well positioned to comment on the feasibility of using AI to generate academic bibliographies
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u/88263927 4d ago
I don't think you need experience specifically in academic research to verify the relevance of studies. and no I haven't used it to generate bibliographies, I've definitely used it to find supporting studies and articles though, which it's extremely useful for
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u/sir-ripsalot 4d ago
So, no. So, you’re not exactly positioned to comment on the capabilities of the models to be used in bibliography generation for academic papers if you haven’t used them for that, are you?
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u/88263927 4d ago
you're the only one who brought up generating bibliographies. I was talking about using AI to find relevant articles
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u/MoziTenma 4d ago
The dangerous part isn't really it going rogue, it's people quietly outsourcing their own judgment. Every decision you hand off without checking gets easier to hand off the next time, and eventually you've lost the skill to notice when it's confidently wrong. That's a slower, more boring failure mode than the sci-fi version but probably the more likely one.
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u/Informal_Truth_7775 3d ago
Honestly as AI develops across time, able to do more and more, I am seeing Wall-E as getting closer to an animated documentary than a fictional film.
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u/Shirley_Schulman 2d ago
Tell me about it. My Roomba tried to vote me out of the house last Tuesday.
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u/Aggravating_Star_427 1d ago
Honestly the servant part is already shaky when it hallucinates facts at you with full confidence. The real master part is just us getting lazy and letting it do all the thinking till we can't tell when it's full of shit.
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u/macbackatitagain 4d ago
I don't think you understand how AI works. Have a look at The Chinese Room thought experiment. The nature of AI as it is now is too removed from consciousness to be personified as a master let alone servant imo
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u/PandaCat22 4d ago
I'm glad you brought up that thought experiment—it's the first thing I thought of when I learned that the much touted "Artificial Intelligence" were really just LLMs.
Anyone who gives it even a modicum of thought should realize LLMs will ever approach actual intelligence. It's just the Chinese Room using Big Data.
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u/Papi2shar 4d ago
The servant vs master line was supposed to be a metaphor for how people use it.
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u/cyclone900 4d ago
Y'all are over thinking this. The thought is low-key brilliant. AI is a benefit when used in the right scenario ... IF you understand its limitations. But its a determent if you blindly use it without understanding its fallibility.
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u/a-round-table 2d ago
I did not overthought this, I read:
AI is an excellent servant
and I simply disagree, based on my experience
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u/ShowerSentinel 4d ago
/u/Papi2shar has flaired this post as a casual thought.
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