MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information · Issue #9208 · mdn/yari | MDN now providing LLM generated explainer text for code samples

3 years ago by farcical_continuation to c/programming

Summary MDN's new "ai explain" button on code blocks generates human-like text that may be correct by happenstance, or may contain convincing falsehoods. this is a strange decision for a technical ...

Seems pretty bad?

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TheOtherKundotron 4 points 3 years ago

This feature is in beta. That issue title is sort of exaggerated tbh. Test it if you want, but take everything their beta LLM spits out with grain of salt.

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heartlessevil 29 points 3 years ago

The "ai explain" button doesn't mention that it's in beta even in the expanded detail text. But more importantly, even once out of beta, LLMs will never be trustworthy references without humans vetting them. This isn't a "beta" problem it's a "completely misunderstood the problem and solution" problem.

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key 4 points 3 years ago

It's crazy how this technology that does nothing more than automatically generate text similar to text humans would write (or whatever else it's trained on) has so many people convinced it's a source of expertise on everything.

There's nothing in there with a capacity of reasoning or awareness of fact. It's the difference between an ALU and a CPU at this point. And a lot of people perfectly aware of that fact are essentially grifting the less savvy masses who see a black box that sounds smart.

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Deely 4 points 3 years ago

I suppose they can add source URL of information, so, you can verify correctness. But then I don't get it why we need lying AI if we can get URL in the first place. So, it will work just like any other good search engine.

Sorry if I sound salty, but I still don't get why companies put fake AI engines everywhere.

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TheOtherKundotron 1 point 3 years ago

Marketing I guess. MDN docs is already really well written, so it does not make sense that much to have this tool. But that is just my opinion.

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nitefox 2 points 3 years ago

It may do more harm than good, it spits plausible answers that are either completely or subtly wrong (latter is worse obviously) and it’s not easy to discern how good an answer actually is

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devfuuu 2 points 3 years ago

And if people are asking the stupid AI for things it's exactly because people don't know about a subject, so there's no way for the ones that are asking to validate the information so people are fed bad information and believe it's the truth.

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