Comment by overgard

Comment by overgard a day ago

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Well I mean, nitpick, but Fentanyl is a useful medication in the right context. It's not inherently evil.

I think my biggest concern with AI is its biggest proponents have the least wisdom imaginable. I'm deeply concerned that our technocrats are running full speed at AGI with like zero plan for what happens if it "disrupts" 50% of jobs in a shockingly short period of time, or worse outcomes (theres some evidence the new tariff policies were generated with LLMs.. its probably already making policy. But it could be worse. What happens when bad actors start using these things to intentionally gaslight the population?)

But I actually think AI (not AGI) as an assistant can be helpful.

Terr_ 21 hours ago

> I think my biggest concern with AI is its biggest proponents have the least wisdom imaginable. [...] (not AGI)

Speaking of Wisdom and a different "AGI", I think there's an old Dungeons and Dragons joke that can be reworked here:

Intelligence is knowing than an LLM uses vector embeddings of tokens.

Wisdom is knowing LLMs shouldn't be used for business rules.

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brain5ide 21 hours ago

Are we talking about structural things or about individual perspective things?

At individual perspective - AI is useful as a helper to achieve your generative tasks. I'd argue against analytic tasks, but YMMV.

At the societal perspective, e.g. you as individual can not trus anything the society has produced, because it's likely some AI generated bullshit.

Some time ago, if you were not trusting a source, you could build your understanding by evaluating a plurality of sources and perspectives and get to the answer in a statistical manner. Now every possible argument can be stretched in any possible dimension and your ability to build a conclusion has been ripped away.

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  • walterbell 21 hours ago

    > build your understanding by evaluating a plurality of sources and perspectives and get to the answer in a statistical manner

    A few thousand years of pre-LLM primary sources remain available for evaluation by humans and LLMs.

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    • coryrc 21 hours ago

      You and I remember pre-AI famous works. "Hey, I'm pretty sure Odysseus took a long time to get home". Somebody goes and prints 50 different AI-generated versions of the _Odyssey_, how are future generations supposed to know which is real and which is fake?

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      • walterbell 20 hours ago

        > how are future generations supposed to know which is real

        Reality/truth/history has always been an expensive pursuit in the face of evolving pollutants.

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        • coryrc 7 hours ago

          That's definitely true. History has been thoroughly manufactured by humans. Naively, I thought the storage of computers might preserve first-hand accounts forever; it might, but it might not be discernible.

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      • noosphr 20 hours ago

        This is literally how the Odyssey was passed down for the 2000 years before the printing press was invented.

        Every work had multiple versions. All versions were different. Some versions were diametrically opposed to others.

        Have a look at Bible scholarship to see just _how_ divergent texts can become by nothing more than scribe errors.

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spooky_action 18 hours ago

What evidence is there that tarrif policy was LLM generated?

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  • calcifer 17 hours ago

    There are uninhabited islands on the list.

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    • KoolKat23 16 hours ago

      Despite people's ridicule this is normal practice, prevents loopholes being exploited.

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      • mr_toad 15 hours ago

        It seems more likely that bad data was involved.

        There are actually export statistics (obviously errors, possibly fraud) for these islands. Someone probably stuck the numbers in a formula without digging a little deeper.

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  • af78 17 hours ago

    There are people who asked several AI engines (ChatGPT, Grok etc.) “what should the tariff policy be to bring the trade balance to zero?” (quoting from memory) an the answer was the formula used by the Trump administration. If I find the references I will post them as a follow-up.

    Russia, North Korea and handful of other countries were spared, likely because they sided with the US and Russia at the UN General Assembly on Feb 24 of this year, in voting against “Advancing a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.” https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4076672

    EDIT: Found it: https://nitter.net/krishnanrohit/status/1907587352157106292

    Also discussed here: https://www.latintimes.com/trump-accused-using-chatgpt-creat...

    The theory was first floated by Destiny, a popular political commentator. He accused the administration of using ChatGPT to calculate the tariffs the U.S. is charged by other countries, "which is why the tariffs make absolutely no fucking sense."

    "They're simply dividing the trade deficit we have with a country with our imports from that country, or using 10%, whichever is greater," Destiny, who goes by @TheOmniLiberal on X, shared in a post on Wednesday.

    > I think they asked ChatGPT to calculate the tariffs from other countries, which is why the tariffs make absolutely no fucking sense.

    > They're simply dividing the trade deficit we have with a country with our imports from that country, or using 10%, whichever is greater. https://t.co/Rc45V7qxHl pic.twitter.com/SUu2syKbHS

    > — Destiny | Steven Bonnell II (@TheOmniLiberal) April 2, 2025

    He attached a screenshot of his exchange with the AI bot. He started by asking ChatGPT, "What would be an easy way to calculate the tariffs that should be imposed on other countries so that the US is on even-playing fields when it comes to trade deficit? Set minimum at 10%."

    "To calculate tariffs that help level the playing field in terms of trade deficits (with a minimum tariff of 10%), you can use a proportional tariff formula based on the trade deficit with each country. The idea is to impose higher tariffs on countries with which the U.S. has larger trade deficits, thus incentivizing more balanced trade," the bot responded, along with a formula to use.

    John Aravosis, an influencer with a background in law and journalism, shared a TikTok video that then outlined how each tariff was calculated; by essentially taking the U.S. trade deficit with the country divided by the total imports from that country to the U.S.

    "Guys, they're setting U.S. trade policy based on a bad ChatGPT question that got it totally wrong. That's how we're doing trade war with the world," Aravosis proclaimed before adding the stock market is "totally crashing."

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XorNot 19 hours ago

Honestly this post seems like misplaced wisdom to me: your concern is the development of AGI displacing jobs and not the numerous reliability problems with the analytic use of AI tools in particular the overestimate of LLM capabilities because they're good at writing pretty prose?

If we were headed straight to the AGI era then hey, problem solved - intelligent general machines which can advance towards solutions in a coherent if not human like fashion is one thing but that's not what AI is today.

AI today is enormously unreliable and very limited in a dangerous way - namely it looks more capable then it is.

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