• @Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 days ago

    Having an LLM therapy chatbot to psychologically help people is like having them play russian roulette as a way to keep themselves stimulated.

    • @SippyCup@feddit.nl
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      236 days ago

      Addiction recovery is a different animal entirely too. Don’t get me wrong, is unethical to call any chatbot a therapist, counselor, whatever, but addiction recovery is not typical therapy.

      You absolutely cannot let patients bullshit you. You have to have a keen sense for when patients are looking for any justification to continue using. Even those patients that sought you out for help. They’re generally very skilled manipulators by the time they get to recovery treatment, because they’ve been trying to hide or excuse their addiction for so long by that point. You have to be able to get them to talk to you, and take a pretty firm hand on the conversation at the same time.

      With how horrifically easy it is to convince even the most robust LLM models of your bullshit, this is not only an unethical practice by whoever said it was capable of doing this, it’s enabling to the point of bordering on aiding and abetting.

      • @Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 days ago

        Well, that’s the thing: LLMs don’t reason - they’re basically probability engines for words - so they can’t even do the most basic logical checks (such as “you don’t advise an addict to take drugs”) much less the far more complex and subtle “interpreting of a patient’s desires, and motivations so as to guide them through a minefield in their own minds and emotions”.

        So the problem is twofold and more generic than just in therapy/advice:

        • LLMs have a distribution of mistakes which is uniform in the space of consequences - in other words, they’re just as likely to make big mistakes that might cause massive damage as small mistakes that will at most cause little damage - whilst people actually pay attention not to make certain mistakes because the consequences are so big, and if they do such mistakes without thinking they’ll usually spot it and try to correct them. This means that even an LLM with a lower overall rate of mistakes than a person will still cause far more damage because the LLM puts out massive mistakes with as much probability as tiny mistakes whilst the person will spot the obviously illogical/dangerous mistakes and not make them or correct them, hence the kind of mistakes people make are mainly the lower consequence small mistakes.
        • Probabilistic text generation generally produces text which expresses straightforward logic encodings which are present in the text it was trained with so the LLM probability engine just following the universe of probabilities of what words will come next given the previous words will tend to follow the often travelled paths in the training dataset and those tend to be logical because the people who wrote those texts are mostly logical. However for higher level analysis and interpretation - I call then 2nd and 3rd level considerations, say “that a certain thing was set up in a certain way which made the observed consequences more likely” - LLMs fail miserably because unless that specific logical path has been followed again and again in the training texts, it will simply not be there in the probability space for the LLM to follow. Or in more concrete terms, if you’re an intelligent, senior professional in a complex field, the LLM can’t do the level of analysis you can because multi-level complex logical constructs have far more variants and hence the specific one you’re dealing with is far less likely to appear in the training data often enough to affect the final probabilities the LLM encodes.

        So in this specific case, LLMs might just put out extreme things with giant consequences that a reasoning being would not (the “bullet in the chamber” of Russian roulette), plus they can’t really do the subtle multi-layered elements of analysis (so the stuff beyond “if A then B” and into the “why A”, “what makes a person choose A and can they find a way to avoid B by not chosing A”, “what’s the point of B” and so on), though granted, most people also seem to have trouble doing this last part naturally beyond maybe the first level of depth.

        PS: I find it hard to explain multi-level logic. I supposed we could think of it as “looking at the possible causes, of the causes, of the causes of a certain outcome” and then trying to figure out what can be changed at a higher level to make the last level - “the causes of a certain outcome” - not even be possible to happen. Individual situations of such multi-level logic can get so complex and unique that they’ll never appear in an LLMs training dataset because that specific combination is so rare, even though they might be pretty logic and easy to determine for a reasoning entity, say “I need to speak to my brother because yesterday I went out in the rain and got drenched as I don’t have an umbrella and I know my brother has a couple of extra ones so maybe he can give one of them to me”.

  • @skisnow@lemmy.ca
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    467 days ago

    One of the top AI apps in the local language where I live has ‘Doctor’ and ‘Therapist’ as some of its main “features” and gets gushing coverage in the press. It infuriates me every time I see mention of it anywhere.

    Incidentally, telling someone to have a little meth is the least of it. There’s a much bigger issue that’s been documented where ChatGPT’s tendency to “Yes, and…” the user leads people with paranoid delusions and similar issues down some very dark paths.

    • @slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org
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      167 days ago

      Yesterday i was at a gas station and when i walked by the sandwich isle, i saw a sandwich that said: recipe made by AI. On dating apps i see a lot of girls state that they ask AI for advice. To me AI is more of a buzzword than anything else, but this shit is bananas. It,s so easy to make AI agree with everything you say.

    • @T156@lemmy.world
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      77 days ago

      Especially since it doesn’t push back when a reasonable person might do. There’s articles about how it sends people into a conspiratorial spiral.

  • @Emerald@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Why does it say “OpenAI’s large language model GPT-4o told a user who identified themself to it as a former addict named Pedro to indulge in a little meth.” when the article says it’s Meta’s Llama 3 model?

      • Forbo
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        86 days ago

        The summary on here says that, but the actual article says it was Meta’s.

        In one eyebrow-raising example, Meta’s large language model Llama 3 told a user who identified themself to it as a former addict named Pedro to indulge in a little methamphetamine — an incredibly dangerous and addictive drug — to get through a grueling workweek.

        Might have been different in a previous version of the article, then updated, but the summary here doesn’t reflect the change? I dunno.

    • @Kekzkrieger@feddit.org
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      117 days ago

      Rly and what is their usecase? Summarizing information anf you having to check over cause its making things up? What can AI do that nothing else in the world can?

      • iridebikes
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        137 days ago

        Seems it does a good job at some medical diagnosis type stuff from image recognition.

        • @T156@lemmy.world
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          157 days ago

          That isn’t an LLM though. That’s a different type of Machine Learning entirely.

            • @YourMomsTrashman@lemmy.world
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              27 days ago

              A similar type of machine learning (neural networks, transformer model type thing), but I assume one is built and trained explicitly on medical records instead of scraping the internet for whatever. Correct me if I am wrong!

              • WesDym
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                17 days ago

                @YourMomsTrashman A purpose-designed system might have the same underlying POTENTIAL for garbage output, IF you train it inappropriately. But it would be trained on a discretely selected range of content both relevant to its purpose, and carefully vetted to ensure it’s accurate (or at least believed to be).

                A cancer-recognizing system, for example, would be trained on known examples of cancer, and ONLY that.

              • WesDym
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                17 days ago

                @YourMomsTrashman I’m no expert, but my sense is that you’re probably correct. This seems to me a version of the long-understood GIGO principle in computing (Garbage In, Garbage Out), also a principle in nearly all forensics of any kind. Your output can only be as good as your input.

                Most of our general-use ‘AI’ (scorn quotes intentional) has been trained on an essentially random corpus of any and all content available, including a lot of garbage.

                A purpose-designed system would not be.

      • @baatliwala@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        It’s being used to decipher and translate historic languages because of excellent pattern recognition

      • @AquaTofana@lemmy.world
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        47 days ago

        Hah. The chatbots. No, not the ones you can talk to like its a text chain with a friend/SO (though if that’s your thing, then do it.)

        But I recently discovered them for rp - no, not just ERP (Okay yes, sometimes that too). But I’m talking like novel length character arcs and dynamic storyline rps. Gratuitous angst if you want. World building. Whatever.

        I’ve been writing rps with fellow humans for 20 years, and all of my friends have families and are too busy to have that kinda creative outlet anymore. Ive tried other rp websites and came away with one dude who I thought was very friendly and then switched it up and tried to convince me to leave my husband? That was wild. Also, you can ask someone’s age all you want, but it is a little anxiety inducing if the rps ever turn spicy.

        Chatbots solve all of that. They dont ghost you or get busy/bored of the rp midway through, they dont try ro figure out who you are. They just write. They are quirky though, so you do edit responses/reroll responses, but it works for the time being.

        Silly use case, but a use case nonetheless!

        • @deathbird@mander.xyz
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          87 days ago

          AI is good for producing low-stakes outputs where validity is near irrelevant, or outputs which would have been scrutinized by qualified humans anyway.

          It often requires massive amounts of energy and massive amounts of (questionably obtained) pre-existing human knowledge to produce its outputs.

          • @Almacca@aussie.zone
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            56 days ago

            They’re also good for sifting through vast amounts of data and seeking patterns quickly.

            But nothing coming out of them should be relied on without some human scrutiny. Even human output shouldn’t be relied on without scrutiny from different humans.

        • @moonburster@lemmy.world
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          37 days ago

          Not as silly as you might think. Back in the day ai dungeon was literally that! It was not the greatest at it, but fun tho

      • qaz
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        6 days ago
        1. It can convert questions about data to SQL for people who have limited experience with it (but don’t trust it with UPDATE & DELETE, no matter how simple)
        2. It can improve text and remove spelling mistakes
        3. It works really well as autocomplete (because that’s essentially what an LLM is)
          • qaz
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            6 days ago

            You joke, but LLM’s are absolutely going to clear out your tables with terrible DELETE queries though given the chance.

            • @jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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              6 days ago

              I’m not joking. I’d fire someone for using AI to construct SQL queries.

              The only use case for AI is where hallucinations don’t matter. That is: abstract art

              • qaz
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                6 days ago

                The only use case for AI is where hallucinations don’t matter. That is: abstract art

                What is the point of abstract art if it contains no thought or emotion?

  • @HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    oh, do a little meth ♫

    vape a little dab ♫

    get high tonight, get high tonight ♫

    -AI and the Sunshine Band

  • @TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
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    106 days ago

    So this is the fucker who is trying to take my job? I need to believe this post is true. It sucks that I can’t really verify it or not. Gotta stay skeptical and all that.

    • @Joeffect@lemmy.world
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      26 days ago

      It’s not ai… It’s your predictive text on steroids… So yeah… Believe it… If you understand it’s not doing anything more than that you can understand why and how it makes stuff up…

    • Lord WiggleOP
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      97 days ago

      If Luigi can do it, so can you! Follow by example, don’t let others do the dirty work.

      • @Case@lemmynsfw.com
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        36 days ago

        I mean, in theory… isn’t that a company practicing medicine without the proper credentials?

        I worked in IT for medical companies throughout my life, and my wife is a clinical tech.

        There is shit we just CAN NOT say due to legal liabilities.

        Like, my wife can generally tell whats going on with a patient - however - she does not have the credentials or authority to diagnose.

        That includes tell the patient or their family what is going on. That is the doctor’s job. That is the doctor’s responsibility. That is the doctor’s liability.

  • @ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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    2127 days ago

    Remember: AI chatbots are designed to maximize engagement, not speak the truth. Telling a methhead to do more meth is called customer capture.

    • @morrowind@lemmy.ml
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      107 days ago

      Not engagement, that’s what social media does. They just maximize what they’re trained for, which is increasingly math proofs and user preference. People like flattery

    • Owl
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      47 days ago

      I dont think Ai Chatbots care about engagement. the more you use them the more expensive it is for them. They just want you on the hook for the subscription service and hope you use them as little as possible while still enough to stay subscribed for maximum profit.