Post

I use Claude (an AI) to scan my posts for spelling and grammar errors. On the most recent post (about the East Wing, link below), I got a really amazing addendum. www.pbump.net/o/yes-most-a...

1K reposts2.9K likes

By using these tools and capitulating to the branding exercise of calling chatbots "AI" you deserve to have your tools fall apart in your hands. Spelling and grammar are use cases that have been solved by all modern word processing software, are you just stupid?

I know this sounds snarky or whatever, but it's a serious question. I'm an editor who has tested dozens of tools, both genAI and not, to get the lay of the land, who has seen the former completely ruin people's writing, and then of course the whole supporting unrepentant mass theft/plagiarism thing.

I’ve used Claude to gather facts around the implementation of rank choice voting, & other issues. It gave me old information, such as not knowing particular municipalities have adopted RCV, which has made me think that there’s a time lag regarding the information its aggregating. That’s pretty bad.

Wow, but not likely nefarious. It likely is simply the result of Claude not having retrained its model in a couple of weeks. I'd follow up with questions like: if such a scenario were to occur, what would the political implications be?

Fun thing about LLMs… they’re predictors based on existing references. LLMs have dependencies on how “recent” their scan for new information has run, and how “reliable” those sources are. As more LLMs encounter barriers to reliable info (due to cost/licensing) they’ll erode in factual quality.

I think this is a good example of how deep we are in an epistemic crisis in which demonstrable and provable facts are dismissed by so-called experts, both systems and individuals. People don't question the intent and veracity of clearly false statements. We have a bigger problem now.

That is my entire experience with ChatGPT. It also cites right wing sources that are rated near zero credibility with mediabiasfactcheck. And it just flat out cites a source with quotes that do not exist. I am hoping that by adding my (crazed) feedback when it does this, it is helping retrain it.

This is a really excellent example. Just how quickly can a general purpose LLM consume current events as factual content? And if you bias it towards more rapid assimilation of information how much do you increase a tendency to assert mis/disinformation as fact?

The model is stuck in time at the moment of its release; however, this is easily fixed if you tell it to search the internet. It is interesting that Claude thought it would be such a significant event; it was, of course, but it’s one of a 1000+ other horrible things Trump and his henchmen are doing