What worries me is that _a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves_ and anthropmorphize them into a sort of human-exact intelligence. The worst-case scenario of Utah's law is that when the disclaimer is added that the report is generated by AI, enough jurists begin to associate that with "likely more correct than not".
Reading how AI is being approached in China, the focus is more on achieving day to day utilty, without eviscerating youth employment.<p>In contrast, the SV focus of AI has been about skynet / singularity, with a hype cycle to match.<p>This is supported by the lack of clarity on actual benefits, or clear data on GenAI use. Mostly I see it as great for prototyping - going from 0 to 1, and for use cases where the operator is highly trained and capable of verifying output.<p>Outside of that, you seem to be in the land of voodoo, where you are dealing with something that eerily mimics human speech, but you don't have any reliable way of finding out its just BS-ing you.
Do you have any links you could share to content you found especially insightful about AI use in China?
I don't know if it supports their particular point, but <i>Machine Decision is Not Final</i> seems like a very cool and interesting look at China's culture around AI:<p><a href="https://www.urbanomic.com/book/machine-decision-is-not-final/" rel="nofollow">https://www.urbanomic.com/book/machine-decision-is-not-final...</a>
In the West we have autonomous systems to commit genocide, detecting and murdering "enemy combatants" at scale, where "enemy combatant" is defined as "male between the ages of 15 and 55".<p>Sometimes I'm not so sure about any so-called moral superiority.
I’ve been hunting for a link I found here on HN, which discussed how policy /government elites in China looked at AI.<p>Sadly, the search for that link continues.<p>I did find these from SCMP and Foreign Policy, but there are better articles out there.<p>- <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/20/china-ai-race-jobs-youth-unemployment/" rel="nofollow">https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/20/china-ai-race-jobs-yout...</a><p>- <a href="https://www.scmp.com/specialist-publications/special-reports/topics/wealth-alternative-investments/article/3332729/china-bets-real-world-ai-uses-backed-state-support-and-innovation" rel="nofollow">https://www.scmp.com/specialist-publications/special-reports...</a>
I’m not seeing the dichotomy as much as you do.<p>Are they not going to build a “skynet” in China? Second, building skynet doesn’t imply eviscerating youth employment.<p>On the other hand, automation of menial tasks does eviscerate all kinds of employment, not only youth emoloyment.
Well at least DeepMind is doing nifty things like solving the protein folding problem.
One problem here is "smarter" is an ambiguous word. I have no problem believing the average LLM has more knowledge than my brain; if that's what "smarter" means, them I'm happy to believe I'm stupid. But I sure doubt an LLM's ability to deduce or infer things, or to understand its own doubts and lack of knowledge or understanding, better than a human like me.
Yeah my thought is that you wouldn't trust a brain surgeon who has read every paper on brain surgery ever written but who has never touched a scalpel.<p>Similarly, the claim is that ~90% of communication is nonverbal, so I'm not sure I would trust a negotiator who has seen all of written human communication but never held a conversation.
> a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves<p>Well, in many cases they might be right..
As far as I can tell from poking people on HN about what "AGI" means, there might be a general belief that the median human is not intelligent. Given that the current batch of models apparently isn't AGI I'm struggling to see a clean test of what AGI might be that a human can pass.
LLMs may appear to do well on certain programming tasks on which they are trained intensively, but they are incredibly weak. If you try to use an LLM to generate, for example, a story, you will find that it will make unimaginable mistakes. If you ask an LLM to analyze a conversation from the internet it will misrepresent the positions of the participants, often restating things so that they mean something different or making mistakes about who said what in a way that humans never do. The longer the exchange the more these problems are exacerbated.<p>We are incredibly far from AGI.
We do have AI systems that write stories [0]. They work. The quality might not be spectacular but if you've ever gone out and spent time reading fanfiction you'd have to agree there are a lot of rather terrible human writers too (bless them). It still hits this issue that if we want LLMs to compete with the best of humanity then they aren't there yet, but that means defining human intelligence as something that most people don't have access to.<p>> If you ask an LLM to analyze a conversation from the internet it will misrepresent the positions of the participants, often restating things so that they mean something different or making mistakes about who said what in a way that humans never do.<p>AI transcription & summary seems to be a strong point of the models so I don't know what exactly you're trying to get to with this one. If you have evidence for that I'd actually be quite interested because humans are so bad at representing what other people said on the internet it seems like it should be an easy win for an AI. Humans typically have some wild interpretations of what other people write that cannot be supported from what was written.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/google-deepmind/dramatron" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/google-deepmind/dramatron</a>
I haven't tried Dramatron, but my experience is that it isn't possible to do sensibly. With regard to the second part<p>>AI transcription & summary seems to be a strong point of the models so I don't know what exactly you're trying to get to with this one. If you have evidence for that I'd actually be quite interested because humans are so bad at representing what other people said on the internet it seems like it should be an easy win for an AI. Humans typically have some wild interpretations of what other people write that cannot be supported from what was written.<p>Transcription and summarization is indeed fine, but try posting a longer reddit or HN discussion you've been part of into any model of your choice and ask it to analyze it, and you will see severe errors very soon. It will consistently misrepresent the views expressed and it doesn't really matter what model you go for. They can't do it.
I can see why they'd struggle, I'm not sure what you're trying to ask the model to do. What type of analysis are you expecting? If the model is supposed to represent the views expressed that would be a summary. If you aren't asking it for a summary what do you want it to do? Do you literally mean you want the model to perform conversational analysis (ie, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_analysis#Method" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_analysis#Method</a>)?
Usually I use the format "Analyze the following ...".<p>For simple discussions this is fine. For complex discussions, especially when people get into conflict-- whether that conflict is really complex or not, problems usually result. The big problems are that the model will misquote or misrepresent views-- attempted paraphrases that actually change the meaning, the ordinary hallucinations etc.<p>For stories the confusion is much greater. Much of it is due to the basic way LLMs work: stories have dialogue, so if the premise contains people not being able to speak each other's language problems come very soon. I remember asking some recent Microsoft Copilot variant to write some portal scenario-- some guys on vacation to Teneriffe rent a catamaran and end up falling through a hole in the world of ASoIAF and into the seas off Essos, where they obviously have a terrible time, and it kept forgetting that they don't know English.<p>This is of course not obviously relevant for what Copilot is intended for, but I feel that if you actually try this you will understand how far we are from something like AGI, because if things like OpenAIs or whoever's systems were in fact close, this would be close too. If we were close we'd probably see silly errors too, but it'd be different kinds of errors, things like not telling you the story you want, not ignoring core instructions or failing to understand conversations.
Your points about misquotes and language troubles are very valid and interesting. But a word of caution on your prompt: you’re asking a lot of the word “analyze” here; if the LLM responded that the thread had 15 comments by 10 unique authors, and a total of 2000 characters, I would classify that as a completely satisfactory answer (assuming the figures were correct) based on the query
> Usually I use the format "Analyze the following ...".<p>It doesn't surprise me that you're getting nonsense, that is an ill-formed request. The AI can't fulfil it because it isn't asking it to do anything. I'm in the same boat as an AI would be, I can't tell what outcome you want. I'd probably interpret it as "summarise this conversation" if someone asked that of me, but you seem to agree that AI are good at summery tasks so that doesn't seem like it would be what you want. If I had my troll hat on I'd give you a frequency analysis of the letters and call it a day which is more passive-aggressive than I'd expect of the AI, they tend to just blather when they get a vague setup. They aren't psychic, it is necessary to give them instructions to carry out.
> We are incredibly far from AGI.<p>This and we don't actually know what the foundation models are for AGI, we're just assuming LLMs are it.
This seems distant from my experience. Modern LLMs are superb at summarisation, far better than most people.
> there might be a general belief that the median human is not intelligent<p>This is to deconstruct the question.<p>I don't think it's even wrong - a lot of people are doing things, making decisions, living life perfectly normally, successfully even, without applying intelligence in a personal way. Those with socially accredited 'intelligence' would be the worst offenders imo - they do not apply their intelligence personally but simply massage themselves and others towards consensus. Which is ultimately materially beneficial to them - so why not?<p>For me 'intelligence' would be knowing why you are doing what you are doing without dismissing the question with reference to 'convention', 'consensus', someone/something else. Computers can only do an imitation of this sort of answer. People stand a chance of answering it.
>knowing why you are doing what you are doing[...] Computers can only do an imitation of this sort of answer. People stand a chance of answering it.<p>I'm not following. A computer's "why" is a written program, surely that is the most clear expression of its intent you could ask for?
Being an intelligent being is not the same as being considered intelligent relative to the rest of your species. I think we’re just looking to create an intelligence, meaning, having the attributes that make a being intelligent, which mostly are the ability to reason and learn. I think the being might take over from there no?<p>With humans, the speed and ease with which we learn and reason is capped. I think a very dumb intelligence with stay dumb for not very long because every resource will be spent in making it smarter.
Why would the dumb intelligence be less constrained than a human in making itself smarter?
I have yet to see an LLM with hands, feet, or eyeballs.<p>Currently, LLMs require hooks and active engagement with humans to ‘do’ anything. Including learn.
> every resource will be spent in making it smarter<p>The root motivation on which every resource will be spent is simply and very obviously to make a profit.
So tired of this argument.
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> ChatGPT (o3): Scored 136 on the Mensa Norway test in April 2025<p>So yes, <i>most</i> people are right in that assumption, at least by the metric of how we generally measure intelligence.
Does an LLM scoring well on the Mensa test translate to it doing excellent and factual police reporting? It is probably not true of humans doing well on the Mensa, why would it be true of an LLM?<p>We should probably rigorously verify that, for a role that itself is about rigorous verification without reasonable doubt.<p>I can immediately, and reasonably, doubt the output of an LLM, pending verification.
> the metric of how [the uninformed] generally measure intelligence
How do the informed measure intelligence?<p>I know I'm too late to ask this question, But I suspect its either; Feelings and intuitions, which is just a primitive IQ test. Or some kind of aptitude test, which is just a different flavor of IQ test.
Court reports should as much be about human sensibility. I have met plenty of high IQ people who were insensitive.
Yeah I certainly associate LLMs with high intelligence when they provide fake links to fake information, I think, man this thing is SMART
Maybe it's just my circle, but anecdotally most of the non-CS folks I know have developed a strong anti-AI bias. In a very outspoken way.<p>If anything, I think they'd consider AI's involvement as a strike against the prosecution if they were on a jury.
A core problem with humans, or perhaps it's not even a problem, just something that takes a long time to recognize, is that they complain and hate on something that they continue to spend money on.<p>Not like food or clothing, but stuff like DLC content, streaming services, and LLMs.
Usually different people. Or, in the case of LLMs, they're not given a no option, or it's carefully hidden.
At least in my case, I suspect they also don't keep up with the progress. They did experiments in 2023/24, were thoroughly put off, have not fired it up since. So the impression they have is frozen in time, a time when it was indeed much less impressive.
Why do people in your circle not like AI?
I have similar a experience about friends and family not liking AI, but usually it’s due to water and energy reasons, not because of an issue with the model reasoning
If your circle has any artists in it, chances are they'll also have a very negative perception, although influenced heavily by the proliferation of AI-generated art.<p>At least personally, I've seen basically three buckets of opinions from non-technical people on AI. There's a decent-sized group of people who loathe anything to do with it due to issues you've mentioned, the art issue I mentioned, or other specific things that overall add up to the point that they think it's a net harm to society, a decent-sized group of people who basically never think about it at all or go out of their way to use anything related to it, and then a small group of people who claim to be fully aware of the limitations and consider themselves quite rational but then will basically ask ChatGPT about literally anything and trust what it says without doing any additional research. It's the last group that I'm personally most concerned about because I've yet to find any effective way of getting them to recognize the cognitive dissonance (although sometimes at least I've been able to make enough of an impression that they stop trying to make ChatGPT a participant in every single conversation I have with them).
Pretty much hit the nail on the head -- while there are some artists, most are from traditional broadly "intellectual" fields. Examples: writers, journalists, academia (liberal arts), publishing industry...
That's a good point; "art" might be a bit too narrow to accurately describe the type of field where people have fairly concrete concerns about how AI relates to what they produce. I'd be tempted to use the label "creative work", but even that doesn't quite feel like it's something that everyone would understand to include stuff like written journalism, which I think is likely to have pretty similar concerns.
AIs are an obvious threat to their ability to make money off their skills.
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> a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves<p>I think the anthropomorphizing part is what messes with people. Is the autocomplete in my IDE smarter than I am? What about the search box on Google? What about a hammer or a drill?<p>Yet, I will admit that most of the time I hear people complaining about how AI written code is worse than that produced by developers, but it just doesn't match my own experience - it's frankly better (with enough guidance and context, say 95% tokens in and 5% tokens out, across multiple models working on the same project to occasionally validate and improve/fix the output, alongside adequate tooling) than what a lot of the people I know could or frankly do produce in practice.<p>That's a lot of conditions, but I think it's the same with the chat format - people accepting unvalidated drivel as fact, or someone using the web search and parsing documents and bringing up additional information that's found as a consequence of the conversation, bringing in external data and making use of the LLM ability to churn through a lot of it, sometimes better than the human reading comprehension would.
I think you're spot on here. It's the same idea as scammers and con artists; people can be convinced of things that they might rationally reject if the language is persuasive enough. This isn't some new exploit in human behavior or an epidemic of people who are less intelligent than before; we've just never had to deal with the amount plausible enough sounding coherent human language being almost literally unlimited before. If we're lucky, people will manage to adapt and update their mental models to be less trustworthy of things that they can't verify (like how most of us hopefully don't need to be concerned their older relatives will transfer their bank account contents to benevolent foreign royalties with the expectation of being rewarded handsomely). It's hard to feel especially confident in this though given how much more open-ended the potential deceptions are (without even getting into the question of "intent" from the models or the creators of them).
My belief is that the function of a story is to provide social cover for our actions. Other people need to evaluate us (both in the moment and after the dust has settled) and while careful data analysis can do the job, who has time for that crap.<p>As such the story can be completely divorced from reality. The important thing is that the story is a good one. A good story transfers your social cover for yourself to your supervisor. They don't have to understand what you did and explain why it's okay that it failed. They just have to understand the story structure that you gave them. Listen to this great story, it's not my report's fault for this failure, and it's certainly not mine, just bad luck.<p>Additionally, the good (and sufficiently original) story is a gift because your supervisor can reuse it for new scenarios.<p>The good salesman gives you the story you need to excuse the purchase that will enable you to succeed. The bad salesman sells you on a story that you need a frivolous purchase.<p>And this is why job hoping is "bad". Eventually the incompetent employee uses up all of their good stories and management catches onto their act. It's embedded into our language. "Oh we've all heard this story before." The job hopper leaves just as their good stories are exhausted and can start over fresh at the new employer.<p>All of this in response to<p>> If we're lucky, people will manage to adapt and update their mental models to be less trustworthy of things that they can't verify<p>Yes, if we're lucky that is what will happen. But I fear that we're going to have to transition to a very low trust society for that to happen.<p>Reliance on the story is reliant on the trust that someone has done the real work. Distrust of the story implies a wider scale distrust in others and institutions.<p>Maybe we can add a tradition of annotating our stories with arguments and proofs. Although I've spent a two decade career desperately trying to give highly technical people arguments and proofs and I've seen stories completely unmoored from reality win out every time.<p>Optimistically, I'm just really bad at it and it's actually a natural transition. Pessimistically, we're in for a bumpy ride.
I'm not sure I'm quite as pessimistic as you, just because I tend to treat most predictions of how society will adapt to things as a whole as fairly low confidence, but I certainly don't disagree that it at least <i>seems</i> hard to imagine people getting past all this quickly.<p>The idea of story being how people justify making their decisions is interesting. I'm reminded of a couple of anecdotes my father has repeated a few times over the years about two distinct medical circumstances he's had. When he was first diagnosed with sleep apnea, he apparently was very skeptical that he had any reason to do anything because the sleep doctor told him things like "this will help you be less sleepy during the day" and "you won't start nodding off as you drive" when he didn't feel like either of those experiences happened to him. Eventually a different sleep doctor did convince him it was worthwhile to treat, and he's used a CPAP since then, he still seems not to feel like it would have made sense for him to start when he first got the diagnosis. Through the lens you've given, the original doctor didn't give him a compelling enough story to justify the effort on his part. On the other hand, the first time he talked to a nutritionist about changing his diet, he apparently mentioned something about how he wanted to at least be able to eat ice cream occasionally, even if it was less often, rather than not ever be able to eat it again, and the nutritionist replied "Of course! that would make life not worth living". He ended up being much more open to listening to the advice of the nutritionist than I would have expected, and I think it would be reasonable to argue that was because the nutritionist was able to give him a story that seemed compelling about what his life would be like with the suggested changes.
AI is smarter than everyone already. Seriously, the breadth of knowledge the AI possesses has no human counterpart.
Just this weekend it (Gemini) has produced two detailed sets of instructions on how to connect different devices over bluetooth, including a video (that I didn’t watch), while the devices did not support doing the connections in that direction. No reasonable human reading the involved manuals would think those solutions feasible. Not impressed, again.
It's pretty similar to looking something up with a search engine, mashing together some top results + hallucinating a bit, isn't it? The psychological effects of the chat-like interface + the lower friction of posting in said chat again vs reading 6 tabs and redoing your search, seems to be the big killer feature. The main "new" info is often incorrect info.<p>If you could get the full page text of every url on the first page of ddg results and dump it into vim/emacs where you can move/search around quickly, that would probably be similarly as good, and without the hallucinations. (I'm guessing someone is gonna compare this to the old Dropbox post, but whatever.)<p>It has no human counterpart in the same sense that humans still go to the library (or a search engine) when they don't know something, and we don't have the contents of all the books (or articles/websites) stored in our head.
> I'm guessing someone is gonna compare this to the old Dropbox post, but whatever.<p>If they do, you’ll be in good company. That post is about the exact opposite of what people usually link it for. I’ll let Dan explain:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281</a>
> If you could get the full page text of every url on the first page of ddg results and dump it into vim/emacs where you can move/search around quickly, that would probably be similarly as good, and without the hallucinations.<p>Curiously, literally nobody on earth uses this workflow.<p>People must be in complete denial to pretend that LLM (re)search engines can’t be used to trivially save hours or days of work. The accuracy isn’t perfect, but entirely sufficient for very many use cases, and will arguably continue to improve in the near future.
> The accuracy isn’t perfect<p>The reason why people don't use LLMs to "trivially save hours or days of work" is because LLMs don't do that. People would use a tool that works. This should be evidence that the tools provide no exceptional benefit, why do you think that is not true?
The only way LLM search engines save time is if you take what it says at face value as truth. Otherwise you still have to fact check whatever it spews out which is the actual time consuming part of doing proper research.<p>Frankly I've seen enough dangerous hallucinations from LLM search engines to immediately discard anything it says.
> People must be in complete denial<p>That seems to be a big part of it, yes. I think in part it’s a reaction to perceived competition.
<p><pre><code> > the breadth of knowledge
</code></pre>
knowledge != intelligence<p>If knowledge == intelligence then Google and Wikipedia are "smarter" than you and the AGI problem has been solved for several decades.
Even if we were going to accept the premise that total knowledge is equivalent to intelligence (which is silly, as sibling comments have pointed out), shouldn't accuracy also come into play? AI also says a lot more obviously wrong things than the average person, so how do you weight that against the purported knowledge? You could answer yes or no randomly to any arbitrary question about whether something is true and approximate a 50% accuracy rate with an evenly distributed pool of questions, but that's obviously not proof that you know everything. I don't think the choice of where to draw the line on "how often can you be wrong and have it still matter" is as easy as you're implying, or that everyone will necessarily agree on where it lies (even if we all agree that 50% correctness is obviously way too low).
AI has more knowledge than everyone already, I wouldn't say smarter though. It's like wisdom vs intelligence in D+D (and/or life).. wisdom is knowing things, intelligence is how quick you can learn / create new things.
AI has zero knowledge, as to know something is to have done it, or seen it first hand.
AI has access to a great deal of data, much of it aquired through criminal action, but no way to evaluate that information other than cross checking for citations and similar occurances.
Even for a human, infering things is difficult and uncertain, and so we regularly see AI fall of the cliff of cohearant word salading.
We are heading strait at an idiocracy writ large that is trying to hide there raciorilgio insanity behind algorythims.
Sometimes it's hard to tell, but it seems that a hairdresser has just been put in charge of the US passport office, which is highy sugestive of a new top level program to issue US citizenship on demand, but everbody else will be subject to the "impartiality" of privatly owned and operated AI policing.
Knowledge is what I see equivalent with a big library. It contains mostly correct information in the context of the book (which might be incorrect in general) and "ai" is very good at taking everything out of context, Smashing a probability distribution over it and picking an answer which humans will accept. E.g. it does not contain knowledge, at best the vague pretense of it.
Man, what are we supposed to do with people who think the above?
I'd do the same thing I'd do with anyone that has a different opinion than me: try my best to have an honest and open discussion with them to understand their point of view and get to the heart of why they believe said thing, without forcefully tearing apart their beliefs. A core part of that process is avoiding saying anything that could cause them to feel shame for believing something that I don't, even if I truly believe they are wrong, and just doing what I can to earnestly hear them out. The optional thing afterwards, if they seem open to it, is express my own beliefs in a way that's palatable and easily understood. Basically explain it in a language they understand, and in a way that we can think about and understand and discuss together, not taking offense to any attempts at questioning or poking holes in my beliefs because that is the discovery process imo for trying something new.<p>Online is a little trickier because you don't know if they're a dog. Well, now a days it's even harder, because they could also not have a fully developed frontal lobe, or worse, they could be a bot, troll, or both.
I don't know, it's kinda terrifying how this line of thinking is spreading even on HN. AI as we have it now is just a turbocharged autocomplete, with a really good information access. It's not smart, or dumb, or anything "human" .
It just shows that true natural intelligence is difficult to define by proxy.
Do you think your own language processing abilities are significantly different from autocomplete with information access? If so, why?
>ChatGPT (o3): Scored 136 on the Mensa Norway IQ test in April 2025<p>If you don't want to believe it, you need to change the goal posts; Create a test for intelligence that we can pass better than AI.. since AI is also better at creating test than us maybe we could ask AI to do it, hang on..<p>>Is there a test that in some way measures intelligence, but that humans generally test better than AI?<p>Answer:Thinking, Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated.<p>Edit, i managed to get one to answer me; the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI). Created by AI researcher François Chollet, this test consists of visual puzzles that require inferring a rule from a few examples and applying it to a new situation.<p>So we do have A test which is specifically designed for us to pass and AI to fail, where we can currently pass better than AI... hurrah we're smarter!
The validity of IQ tests as a measure of broad intelligence has been in question for far longer than LLMs have existed. And if it’s not a proper test for humans, it’s not a proper test to compare humans to anything else, be it LLMs or chimps.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Validity_as_a_measure_of_intelligence" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Validity...</a>
To be intelligent is to realise that any test for intelligence is at best a proxy for some parts of it. There's no objective way to measure intelligence as a whole, we can't even objectively define intelligence.
I believe intelligence is difficult to pin down in words but easy to spot intuitively - and so are deltas in intelligence.<p>E.g watch a Steve jobs interview and a Sam Altman one (at the same age). The difference in the mode of articulation, simplicity in communication, obsession over details etc are huge. This is what superior intelligence to me looks like - you know it when you see it.
>Create a test for intelligence that we can pass better than AI<p>Easy? The best LLMs score 40% on Butter-Bench [1],
while the mean human score is 95%. LLMs struggled the most with multi-step
spatial planning and social understanding.<p>[1] <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21860v1" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21860v1</a>
That is really interesting; Though i suspect its just a effect of differing training data, humans are to a larger degree trained on spacial data, while LLMs are trained to a larger degree on raw information and text.<p>Still it may be lasting limitation if robotics don't catch up to AI anytime soon.<p>Don't know what to make of the Safety Risks test, threatening to power down AI in order to manipulate it, and most act like we would and comply. fascinating.
>humans are to a larger degree trained on spacial data<p>you must be completely LLMheaded to say something like that, lol<p>humans are not trained on spacial data, they are living in the world. humans are very much diffent from silicone chips, and human learning is on another magnitude of complexity compared to a large language model training
Humans <i>are</i> large language models. Maybe the term language is being used a bit liberally here but we basically function in the same way, with the exception of the spacial aspect of our training data.<p>If this hurts your ego then just know the dataset that you built your ego with was probably flawed and if you can put that LoRA aside and try to process this logically; Our awareness is a scalable emergent property of 1-2 decades of datasets, looking at how neurons vs transistor groups work, there could only be a limited amount of ways to process these sizes of data down to relevant streams. The very fact that training LLMs on our output works, proves our output is a product of LLMs or there wouldn't be patterns to find.
Just brace for the societal correction.<p>There's a lot of things going on in the western world, both financial and social in nature. It's not <i>good</i> in the sense of being pleasant/contributing to growth and betterment, but it's a correction nonetheless.<p>That's my take on it anyway. Hedge bets. Dive under the wave. Survive the next few years.
Having knowledge is not exactly the same as being smart though is it.
It's at least one component of it, and by being exceptional in that component it makes up for what it lacks in other components.
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Although it helps immensely.
It's like saying google search is smarter than everyone, amount of information indexed by it has no human counterpart, such a silly take...
I think whether any text is written with the help of AI is not the main issue. The real issue is that for texts like police reports a human still has to take full responsibility for its contents. If we preserve this understanding, than the question of which texts are generated by AI becomes moot.
Sadly justice system is a place where responsibility does not happen. It is not a system where you make one mistake and you are to prison. Instead everyone but the victims of the system are protected and colluded with. More you punish the victims better you make out.
I agree. A programmer has to take responsibility for the generated code they push, and so do police officers for the reports they file. Using a keyboard does not absolve you of typos, it's your responsibility to proofread and correct, this is no different, just a lot more advanced.<p>Of course the problem is also that police often operates without any real oversight and covers up more misconduct than workers in an under-rug sweeping factory. But that's another issue.
> But that's another issue.<p>...is it?<p>It seems to me that the growth of professional police as an institution which bears increased responsibility for public safety, along with an ever-growing set of tools that can be used to defer responsibility (see: it's not murder if it's done with a stun gun, regardless of how predictable these deaths are), are actually precisely the same issue.<p>Let's stop allowing the state to hide behind tooling, and all be approximately equally responsible for public safety.
Yes. Allowing officers to blame AI creates a major accountability gap. Per e.g. the EU AI Act’s logic, if a human "edits" a draft, they must be held responsible and do not need to disclose the use of AI.<p>To ensure safety, those offerings must use premarket red teaming to eliminate biases in summarization. However, ethical safety also requires post-market monitoring, which is impossible if logs aren't preserved. Rather than focusing on individual cases, I think, we must demand systemic oversight in general and access for independent research (not only focussing on a specific technology)
> for texts like police reports<p>If what you mean is, "texts upon which the singular violence of the state is legitimately imposed", then a simple solution (and I believe, on sufficiently long time scales, the happily inevitable one) is to abolish police.<p>I can't fathom, in an age where we have ubiquitous cameras as eyewitnesses, instant communications capability to declare emergencies and request aid from nearby humans, that we need an exclusivity entity whose job it is to advance safety in our communities. It's so, so, so much more trouble that it's worth.
I don’t understand the urgency to replace human work with AI. Why is every organization so eager about skipping the AI as an assistant step? Here there are already massive productivity gains in using the AI to create the draft of the report, it makes little economical to make it do the final version compared to the risk, maybe it’s just plain laziness? Same with developers, why is very organization wanting to leapfrog from humans write all the code to they don’t even read the generated code?
Not everyone is in an urgent hurry to replace people with bots; that's a hyperbolic construct.<p>But to try to answer some of what I think you're trying to ask about: The bot can be useful. It can be better at writing a coherent collection of paragraphs or subroutines than Alice or Bill might be, and it costs a lot less to employ than either of them do.<p>Meanwhile: The bot never complains to HR because someone looked at them sideways. The bot [almost!] never calls in sick; the bot can work nearly 24/7. The bot never slips and falls in the parking lot. The bot never promises to be on-duty while they vacation out-of-state with a VPN or uses a mouse-jiggler to screw up the metrics while they sleep off last night's bender.<p>The bot mostly just follows instructions.<p>There's lots of things the bot doesn't get right. Like, the stuff it produces may be full of hallucinations and false conclusions that need reviewed, corrected, and outright excised.<p>But there's lots of Bills and Alices in the world who are even worse, and the bot is a lot easier and cheaper to deal with than they are.<p>That said: When it comes to legal matters that put a real person's life and freedom in jeopardy, then there should be no bot involved.<p>If a person in a position of power (such as a police officer) can't write a meaningful and coherent report on their own, then I might suggest that this person shouldn't ever have a job where producing written reports are a part of their job. There's probably something else they're good at that they can do instead (the world needs ditchdiggers, too).<p>Neither the presence nor absence of a bot can save the rest of us from the impact of their illiteracy.
Because the biggest cost at a lot of orgs is staff. Your typical software shop will be comical—the salary costs towering down on all the others like LeBron James gazing down at ants. The moment you go from productivity gains to staff reduction you start making real money. Any amount of money for a machine that can fully replace a human process.
> That means that if an officer is caught lying on the stand – as shown by a contradiction between their courtroom testimony and their earlier police report – they could point to the contradictory parts of their report and say, “the AI wrote that.”<p>Normally, if a witness (e.g. a police officer) were found to be recounting something written by a third party, it would be considered hearsay and struck from the record (on objection).<p>It would be an interesting legal experiment to have an officer using this system swear to which portions they wrote themselves, and attempt to have all the rest of the testimony disallowed as hearsay.
I recommend taking a look at this video to get an idea behind the through process (or lack thereof) law enforcement might display when provided with a number of "AI" tools, and even if this one example is closer to traditional face recognition than LLMs, the behavior seems the same. Spoiler: complete submission and deference, and in this specific case to a system that was not even their own.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9M4F_U1eEw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9M4F_U1eEw</a>
I can read that "submission and deference" at the casino as conflict avoidance, the arresting officer says to his peers at the station that he "kind of believes" the suspect. He also states at some point that he can't cite (and I infer then release) the suspect because he is not certain who he is, and therefore has to arrest him as a "John Doe" so that his identity can be established. The fact (?) that the suspect now has a police record for this possible farce won't be settled until after the facts are determined in a court of law.<p>This video demonstrates that when it comes down to it the blunt end of law enforcement is oftentimes a shit show of "seems to work for me" and that goes for facial recognition, shot spotter, contraband dogs, drug & DNA tests, you name it.
> important first step in reigning in AI police reports.<p>That should be 'reining in'. "Reign" is -- ironically - - what monarchs do.
I find this article strange in its logic. If the use of AI generated content is problematic as a principle I can understand the conflict. Then no AI should be used to "transcribe and interpret a video" at all - period. But if the concern is accuracy in the AI "transcript" and not the support from AI as such, isn't it a good thing that the AI generated text is deleted after the officer has processed the text and finalized their report?<p>That said, I believe it is important to aknowlegde the fact that human memory, experience and interpretation of "what really happened" is flawed, isn't that why the body cameras are in use in the first place? If everyone believed police officers already where able to recall the absolute thruth of everything that happens in situations, why bother with the cameras?<p>Personally I do not think it is a good idea to use AI to write full police reports based on body camera recordings. However, as a support in the same way the video recordings are available, why not? If, in the future, AI will write accurate "body cam" based reports I would not have any problems with it as long as the video is still available to be checked. A full report should, in my opinion, always contain additional contextual info from the police involved and witnesses to add what the camera recordings not necessarily reflect or contain.
My worry is at scale AI from one vendor can introduce biases. We wont know what those biases are. But whatever they are the same bias affects all reports.
That is something to worry about, agreed. So, the quality and the reliance of AI is what we should focus on. In addition we should be able to keep track (and records of) how AI has used and build its narrative and conclutions.
The EFF's angle is that the police can use an LLM's initial report maliciously to 1) let incriminating inaccuracies generated by the LLM stand or 2) fabricate incriminating inaccuracies. Afterwards, because the LLM generated the initial report, the officer would have plausible deniability to say they themselves didn't intentionally lie, they were just negligent in editing the initial report. So it's about accountability washing.
>That said, I believe it is important to aknowlegde the fact that human memory, experience and interpretation of "what really happened" is flawed, isn't that why the body cameras are in use in the first place? If everyone believed police officers already where able to recall the absolute thruth of everything that happens in situations, why bother with the cameras?<p>Police tend to not tell the truth, on purpose.
> In July of this year, EFF published a two-part report on how Axon designed Draft One to defy transparency. Police upload their body-worn camera’s audio into the system, the system generates a report that the officer is expected to edit, and then the officer exports the report. But when they do that, Draft One erases the initial draft, and with it any evidence of what portions of the report were written by AI and what portions were written by an officer. That means that if an officer is caught lying on the stand – as shown by a contradiction between their courtroom testimony and their earlier police report – they could point to the contradictory parts of their report and say, “the AI wrote that.” Draft One is designed to make it hard to disprove that.<p>> Axon’s senior principal product manager for generative AI is asked (at the 49:47 mark) whether or not it’s possible to see after-the-fact which parts of the report were suggested by the AI and which were edited by the officer. His response (bold and definition of RMS added):<p>“So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design and that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices.<p>Policing and Hallucinations. Can’t wait to see this replicated globally.
This does sound problematic, but if a police officer's report contradicts the body-worn camera or other evidence, it already undermines their credibility, whether they blame AI or not. My impression is that police don't usually face repercussions for inaccuracies or outright lying in court.<p>> That means that if an officer is caught lying on the stand – as shown by a contradiction between their courtroom testimony and their earlier police report<p>The bigger issue, that the article doesn't cover, is that police officers may not carefully review the AI generated report, and then when appearing in court months or years later, will testify to whatever is in the report, accurate or not. So the issue is that the officer doesn't contradict inaccuracies in the report.
Upvoted because I think it's an important topic, but this take causes me to question the <i>motive</i> for the article... which ironically is my big concern with using LLMs to write stuff generally (the unconscious censoring / proctoring of voice and viewpoint):<p><pre><code> That means that if an officer is caught lying on the stand – as shown by a
contradiction between their courtroom testimony and their earlier police
report – they could point to the contradictory parts of their report and say,
“the AI wrote that.”
</code></pre>
IANAL but if they signed off on it then presumably they own it. Same as if it was Microsoft Dog, an intern, whatever. If they said "the AI shat it" then I'd ask "what parts did you find unacceptable and edit?" and then expect we'd get the juicy stuff hallucinations or "I don't recall". Did they write this, or are they testifying to the veracity of hearsay?<p>From what I've seen reports written by / for lawyers / jurists / judges already "pull" to a voice and viewpoint; I'll leave it there.
> But when they do that, Draft One erases the initial draft, and with it any evidence of what portions of the report were written by AI and what portions were written by an officer. That means that if an officer is caught lying on the stand – as shown by a contradiction between their courtroom testimony and their earlier police report – they could point to the contradictory parts of their report and say, “the AI wrote that."<p>This seems solvable by passing a law that makes the officer legally responsible for the report as if he had written it. He doesn't get to use this excuse in the courtroom and it gets stricken from the record if he tries. That honestly seems like a better solution than storing the original AI-generated version, because that can reinforce the view that AI wrote it to jurors, even if the officer reviewed it and decided it was correct at the time.
Yeah this seems like an obvious solution, which axon ought to be on board with since it protects them.<p>When juniors use the excuse “oh Claude wrote that” in a PR, I tell them if the PR has their name on it, they wrote it - and their PRs are part of their performance review. This is no different
The solution is to remove the temptation to hit a "looks good" button. A non-shitty AI tool could return a bullet list of events and time stamps:<p>- officer said "Freeze!" at 3:12:34am
- "my arm!" said person #2 at 3:12:48am<p>Then the office must at a minimum reformat the events into text and add their own details. Again, AI is a tool and it is immensely useful if we treat it like a tool and not a panacea.
The experiments of AI agents sending emails to grown-ups are good I think – AIs are doing much more dangerous stuff like these AI Police Reports. I don't think making a fuss over every agent-sent email is going to cause other AI incursion into our society to slow down. The Police Report writer is a non-human partially autonomous participant like a K9 officer. It's wishful thinking that AIs aren't going to be set loose doing jobs. The cat is out of the bag.
To me it’s a question of it they are on average better. It’s not like human based input is perfect either.
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