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Comment by doc_ick | Hacker News Reader

It isn’t nearly as easy but it’s more reliable whereas using an llm is prone to unknown hallucinations (also ignoring the obvious ethical considerations of llms).

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15 years ago I was talking to my HR rep about covering my child on healthcare. Her other parent and I were not married. “No you can’t cover her!” “Why not, I’m one of the two parents?” “Because you’re not married!” “So what?”

Humans also make shit up all the time.

Cool, but the information on government websites generally meets a higher standard than just ‘making shit up all the time’ so it’s not really a relevant comparison.

We must not live on the same planet. Most government websites are completely fucking useless here. It’s different where you’re from?

Useless, perhaps, but generally say true things rather than false things, in my experience.

> Humans also make shit up all the time.

Kind of like saying something happens "all the time" and sharing a single example from 15 years ago. Not to mention that a private company's HR team is not the government.

I, for one, completely agree with the statement that 'humans make things up all the time' (often non-maliciously) also

Yes, but when a human makes shit up, they're still legally liable for what they said, and depending on context can be compelled to fix the issue or lose their job.

If an LLM makes shit up, your one and only recourse is "computer says no".

We were discussing zoning in another thread, I think your comment here is very appropriate. People make up all sorts of reasons to oppose land uses, which is part of the reason municipal land control is so dangerous.

The concerns about hallucination are overstated. LLMs don’t hallucinate nearly as much as they used to.

I encounter it daily in the LLM outputs my coworkers produce.

I see it every day in the text, images, and video posted by AI proponents on social media. Full of errors and wtfs and the people posting the tripe don't seem to notice it.

Maybe you've just stopped paying attention so you don't notice as much anymore?

Would your co-workers not make sh!t up if they weren't using LLMs? Pretty sure they would. And MUCH more frequently than the very rare hallucinations one runs into with decent LLMs these days.

My coworkers can be wrong, sure. But no, they weren't making stuff up pre-LLMs. But now making stuff up is automated and easy, so we've gone from simply mistaken to piles of "what the hell is this even trying to say?"

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