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Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof: :Nonbinary: -> EMF 2026"):
riverpunk@defcon.social ("River") wrote:
@Tak The most incredible and useful thing the AI industry did, was to ingest nearly the entire corpus of all human creation that exists, digitizing anything that wasn't already available online. Then, they packaged it in a basic, fulltext syntax that could (incidentally) be easily searched through.
Hell, they even created a program that could do fancy vector math to associate words and phrases with similar meanings together, so you can use a search term which does not show up in a document, but because you're describing a similar problem or phenomena, it can associate the two.
THEN, rather than just packaging this tool as a simple search engine that would turn up the original source document in the corpus which matches your query best, they INSTEAD decided they wanted to just make it kind of try to answer by doing the same word association stuff to try to generate an answer output back to you, halfway pulling from content that was memorized in its weights, and halfway done by literally bullshitting, and coming up with incorrect info.
We were so close to getting something spectacular that would've added synergistically to human creativity, but we felt the need to see AI as a god, or a digital person, instead of seeing it as a compilation of all human effort. And so it was built to generate answers on its own, instead of spitting back the higher quality answers that it was trained on.