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Comment by M4v3R | Hacker News Reader

Doesn’t this make these kind of chatbots useless until this issue is fixed? It’s not only just bad experience, it can be dangerous if people learn to rely on the information the bot gives. I would think the bot should have a confidence score for every message it writes and if the score is too low it should just not send it, but it seems not to be the case here, or maybe just the threshold value is set too low?

Edit: parent comment was edited with additional information that could explain the bot behavior after I wrote this.

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>Doesn’t this make these kind of chatbots useless until this issue is fixed? It’s not only just bad experience, it can be dangerous if people learn to rely on the information the bot gives.

Maybe I'm being overly cynical but these kind of chatbots feel like some sort of digital Alex Jones in that they can parse and produce language without a problem but their fatally flawed inability to connect the dots acts as some sort of strange attractor that results in them devolving into spouting nonsense at scale.

Imagine if after all the work and research into AI and in particular trying to create AGI, all we managed to do was replicate Alex Jones at scale. I shudder to think.

Well it's pretty much inevitable that along the way to making a machine with the intelligence of a man, we're going to make a machine with the intelligence of chimp.

Yes, pretty useless except for play and experimentation. Real chatbots (by “real” I mean ones that are deployed to perform work) actually tend to rely on a lot of hand-coded rules, as you can observe by talking to Siri, or Alexa, or the Amazon support bot. They do use ML to understand the inbound messages, though.

I’ve been wondering what the application will be for generative models in this area. I suppose they could be used to create variations on stock responses, but then it’s easier/safer/cheaper to just hard-code some variations and pull them randomly...

Yeah, sorry for the edits. I was slow to connect some dots.

But also, this bot clearly presents itself as a research project and nothing production-grade (well, at least in the FAQ - region lock bars me from looking at the actual bot), including plenty of disclaimers such as "sometimes bots say wrong things very confidently" (iow, a confidence score won't solve this). So yes, it might be useless, but the creators of the bot know and publicly say this. Which makes it even weirder that someone would try and start a Twitter mob over it.

It's useless either way but I thought this was obvious.

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