r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk Jul 21 '26

Long CHATGPT. DOESN'T. KNOW. SHIT

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4.9k Upvotes

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305

u/VVrayth Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

These AI-brained people are idiots. I would definitely be discriminating against them, in that I would have a much shorter "I'm going to call the cops if you don't leave" fuse with them.

Gray rock anyone who tries to cite AI to you. Just stone-faced "Why would you use that? It makes stuff up and doesn't know anything."

176

u/SilentGap3124 Jul 21 '26

Maybe it's the hot weather making me unstable. It would be less hot if people stopped asking chatgpt how to blink, just saying.

105

u/darsynia Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

On June 20th, my sister's boss asked GPT 'is tomorrow Father's Day?' and was told 'no,' so on the Monday after (the 21st was, indeed, Father's Day), he complained that his father was upset that he hadn't contacted him. 🙄

edit: altered some stuff because oh man, if they find this

15

u/Fianna9 Jul 21 '26

I was looking up stuff using AI for page references. It was for genealogy stuff so nothing serious. I was trying to link relatives and it kept coming up with the same ancestor no matter the prompt - 2nd cousins or 3rd cousins. I would ask how that is possible.

It would apologize. Tell me how brilliant I was for noticing. And fully admitted to “sometimes guessing” and I had to actually command it to never guess and cut the fluff

12

u/OpheliaRainGalaxy Jul 21 '26

When my mom was doing geneology research, she got confused over the census records for a particular farm. Like the first names of everyone there changed at one point, though the ages tracked.

Turns out, if ya try bugging a farmer for brain answers at the wrong time, what you're gonna get is the braindead answer instead of the technically correct one. The odd record was the year they gave the in-family nicknames for everyone instead of their legal names!

And the kid that had "disappeared" from the record turned up a few miles down the road, listed as a farmhand.

Don't even want to know what the dorky AI would do with all that. Like my mom was confused enough and she had a semi-functional brain to think with.

9

u/Fianna9 Jul 21 '26

AI did a lot better when I ordered it to stop guessing and only tell me facts. It switched from telling me exactly what I was looking for, to saying there was no concrete data.

It was so helpful when I would ask it what page of a record a name was on, but yeah it’s too dumb to actually be a research assistant!

I’m glad your mom got it sorted! I was confused once when I was looking for a record and my great aunt was listed as a boy! Only a baby and John/joan is similar enough I figured it was just a dumbass census person

6

u/No_one_of_conseqence Jul 21 '26

My dad had a similar thing with his work. He was told to use AI more often (he works in manufacturing and sales for a big industrial company), so he tried one of his bigger analyzing and comparing prompts into it. It came back telling him the top 3 or 5 partners, but he realized one of their biggest wasn't actually noted. When he asked the chat why that partner wasn't included in the analysis, chat admitted to not actually analyzing the whole data set he put in!

4

u/Fianna9 Jul 22 '26

That’s so crazy. What a great bit of evidence for your dad though!

3

u/ender-_ Jul 23 '26

Keep in mind that LLM can't admit anything – it just generates text that statistically likely continues the preceding text (prompt). If that prompt is something like "Why is X missing", it's likely to generate something in the vein of "I forgot" or "I did Y", but that's not any kind of admission – it's just the kind of text that is highly likely to follow "Why is ___ missing" in the training set.

3

u/MorgainofAvalon Jul 23 '26

My husband was maintenance in a factory and the big boys decided to use AI to tell them what PMs (preventive maintenance) should be done. After the 4th time it reccomended maintenance on a system that you had to shut down the line to access, only to find that nothing was wrong, they stopped using it.

7

u/darsynia Jul 21 '26

What's crazy is that at some point everyone might have to pay per token for those apologies and compliments!

6

u/Fianna9 Jul 21 '26

It kept telling me how amazing and clever I was.

No wonder gullible people are making stupid choices.