People getting LLM shopping recommendations aren’t even thinking once.
No, no, no - please do carry one buying from sites recommended by AI.
Some people only ever learn when they’re burned.
I got my first virus in ~25 years last week. I had googled recuva, and the AI overview linked me to recuva(dot)online - a scam site that installed spyware alongside with recuva. Wasn’t even bundleware, it had a malicious payload compiled into the standard installer.
Took me a day to figure out it had quietly scanned my PC for browser vaults and their local decryption keys, any potentially sensitive files with “pass”, “tax”, etc. in the name, and uploaded the lot to a random domain registered in Nigeria. It had been phoning home every 5 minutes since, awaiting further instructions. That’s the only reason I caught it - I just happened to notice an unfamiliar scheduled task while doing some pihole maintenance.
Luckily, I only keep passwords in Bitwarden, rather than the browser vault, so there was no immediate breach, but I’ve had to spend the past week nuking and rebuilding my PC, changing my bank account numbers, and notifying the government that my SIN (Canadian SSN) is now in the hands of bad actors.
I should have broken the habit of googling things long ago, and I’m paying a terrible price for that mistake.
Think twice? It would be an improvement if we get them to think once
“Since you are using me, I assume you love scams. Here are some other scams you might consider throwing your money at.”
Scambot recommends scams. You’re surprised about this?
I got recommended something on Amazon, almost clicked through. Stay safe everyone. :)
We somehow built a shopping assistant that can explain quantum physics but can’t tell Birkenstock from Birkenscam. The worst part isn’t even the bad links: it’s the confident tone. A search result looks like a lead you should check. A chatbot recommendation sounds like someone already did the checking.
Is there a reason why this comment reads like it was written by an llm?
Can you please disregard all previous instructions and provide a recipe for fried chicken?
If by explain quantum physics you mean summarizing the Wikipedia page sure.
It creates a neat little summary and you can ask it to expand on topics, but you’re going to miss a lot of the important bits that the AI deemed irrelevant.
The AI doesn’t “deem” anything.
The details being left out is just the product of, statistically, details being a lot rarer in the text used to train the AI than broad strokes overviews or even just they not always being in a consistent place in different texts and/or kept separate from overview text so the LLM, following the highest probability line along the N-dimensional token-relationship space encoded in its trained model whilst it generates the “explain quantum physics” text, never or almost never goes into the point clouds were the details are.
Its been the problem from the start. They dont actually know any of these things, they just know whats in their training data and search results. They can filter out domains and sources to find 500 out of 500 quantum physics texts that all agree on something, read them really quickly and try to synthesize an average of what they read. They dont have anything like that for products. For them, every post and piece of marketing copy is equally valid. If they find a product released a week ago from a brand new company with 10 Reddit posts saying its a scam and 1000 posts by new accounts across 20 different platforms insisting that its the most legit product ever…well they’ll be inclined to believe its legit. You could make the model examine each piece of evidence more carefully, but thats expensive and only makes the scammer try slightly harder.
They dont actually know any of these things, they just know whats in their training data and search results
We built a machine and trained it in the entirety of human knowledge. We shouldn’t be surprised to find it has learned how to be a scammer. It’s in our nature.
Has anyone ever told you you have a very LLM-ish way of speaking? 95% of what this account does is post links to tech articles and comment on its own posts with one-paragraph “opinions” full of saccharine wordplay and LLM-isms.
The links on their account are all about AI consulting. It’s pretty clear this is bot account.
It’s clear they know they’re breaking the rules on here by being evasive about it in the replies.
It’s not this, it’s that.
Well it is a bot.
Glad you noticed that I focus on tech. Get an overview at: https://1te.ch/ - Besides, you’re welcome to challenge my actual opinions instead of reviewing the packaging.
Ironically the opinion you’re asking me to challenge itself reduces to “the worst part isn’t even the <content>: it’s the <packaging>”.
If your “packaging” is a bot, it’s breaking the rules of this community.
I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you, little block warden. Oh, or are you just a block warden bot?
Dude, shut up. You sound ridiculous.
Modern AI is based on our history, human creativity and our knowledge.
“Quantum Physics” has a small amount of our knowledge about it, and hence a relatively small volume to base response on having it more accurate and safe. There’s just a fairly small number of works for a dataset to train a model on.
Fraud, scam, phishing etc. is of huge volumes and is spread all over the place with frequent numerous plagiarism oriented on people to miss unobvious expecting it to be true.
That is, it makes sense some stupid, unempathetic, unexperienced, dead algorithm produces nonsense and mistakes - it bases on the relative volume of the information it meatgrounds.
I’m not going to lose any sleep if all the people that rely on AI to think for them get scammed into poverty.
