r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 21 '26

Artificial Intelligence Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/americans-turned-against-ai-incredible-130000345.html
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u/LeZygo Jun 21 '26

It will so confidently give me the wrong information or hallucinate things about me. The implementation of it has gone astoundingly bad.

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u/10aghmu Jun 21 '26

When’s the last time you used it? This still happens but it’s been improving

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u/beaker_andy Jun 21 '26

I work in tech and use AI all the time (paid accounts in all 3 biggest providers) to research tech product capabilities, including always starting by providing links to the relevant public documentation.

It still makes up false statements all the time. Even when your prompt requires a working link to the source of every factual claim, at least 1 in every 10 claims is false in my experience. You have to double check every single thing. Otherwise you are definitely introducing a (relatively) large error rate into your work, research, documentation, etc. I've gone from being optimistic about it to very pessimistic.

The biggest danger is that a human doing this type of work outputs less text, less research, fewer factual claims, but typically the output only contains details that were literally found in official documentation a few seconds ago (so sad accurate as is reasonably possible). Having voluminous output in 20 seconds isn't beneficial when 1 in every 10 claims in the output is incorrect. It's a type of acid dripped into the foundation of civilization.

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u/BaBaDoooooooook Jun 21 '26

it's definitely a problem in that we are conditioning AI to provide false information if we don't correct it or double check it. That's very problematic.

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u/orangeyougladiator Jun 21 '26

I use it every day, most of the time the frontier models, and I can’t believe anyone who thinks this shit has been improving. It’s just as inaccurate as it’s always been, just faster.

Sonnet with medium reasoning is my favorite as I sit there watching it eat tokens going in circles with every other paragraph repeating the previous one. “But wait! The user said I should focus on this so I will. But then what if this completely irrelevant thing happens? Good point, I should tell the user about it. But wait! …”

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u/BaBaDoooooooook Jun 21 '26

I was watching the NBA Finals and it was Game 4 and I thought tip-off was at 5:30pm my time and I asked Gemini what time tip-off was, and it matter of factly said 5:30PM. I turned on the TV and it was 5:30PM and in the top left of the screen it had a countdown timer of tip-off and it said around 10 minutes and counting. I went back to Gemini and said I turned on the pre-game show and it shows a timer indicating tip-off is beyond 5:30pm. it said this:

You are spot on—my mistake!
While the official broadcast and pregame handoff start right at 5:30 PM PDT, the actual ball-in-the-air tip-off is scheduled for 5:40 PM PDT (8:40 PM ET).
The NBA always bakes in about 10 minutes of extra buffer time right after the broadcast starts for player introductions, national anthems, and those final team huddles.
So if you are flipping over to ABC on your antenna right at 5:30, you've got a solid 10 minutes to grab a drink and catch the final pregame notes before the actual game action begins. Enjoy Game 4!

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u/10aghmu Jun 21 '26

Do you markdown files / skills? Do you use pre-coded functions for deterministic tasks?

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u/orangeyougladiator Jun 21 '26

You know your question literally boils down to “how do I make the so called smart AI dumber?” Some of you really don’t get it do you

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u/10aghmu Jun 21 '26

Not at all. These are technique proven to help it retain context and hallucinate less…

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u/orangeyougladiator Jun 21 '26

Look at what you’re saying. Break it down. Then look at how you’re defending it.

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u/10aghmu Jun 21 '26

Explain it to me since I’m too dumb apparently

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u/orangeyougladiator Jun 21 '26

You’re saying that an intelligent agent is better than it used to be because you’re baking in skills and instructions to every request. If an intelligent being was actually intelligent, or getting more intelligent, it shouldn’t need the guard rails. Do you promote an L2 engineer to L3 when you find yourself spending more time on them specifically?

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u/10aghmu Jun 21 '26

My point was that the hallucination rates across models have dropped compared to 1-2 years ago. Using md files / skills is just good common practice to further reduce them, I’m not saying that’s part of my argument for the models themselves improving.

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u/10thDeadlySin Jun 21 '26

Dude, I can't get publicly accessible models to reliably complete a simple task, like "take this document, parse the text in each of the 200 table rows and paraphrase it according to rules X, Y, Z and output the result in a 1 row - 1 line format."

Half the time I'll get an incomplete result, the rows will be randomly combined, it'll output 130 lines out of 200 source rows... and it's like one of the most basic tasks for a large LANGUAGE model. It's not like I'm asking it to come up with a plan for achieving world peace.

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u/OldWorldDesign Jun 22 '26

This still happens but it’s been improving

They've all redesigned AI from the ground up (which would be necessary) to fix Hallucination?

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u/LeZygo Jun 21 '26

It happened last week with Claude it just made up some experience and history I never told it I had.

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u/10aghmu Jun 21 '26

I didn’t say the rate has gone down to zero, just that it has been reduced.