Ask ChatGPT to estimate the carbs in your lunch. Now ask it again. And again. Five hundred times. You’d expect the same answer each time. It’s the same photo, the same model, the same question. But you won’t get the same answer. Not even close — and the differences are large enough to cause a
It’s the same photo, the same model, the same question. But you won’t get the same answer. Not even close — and the differences are large enough to cause a hypoglycaemic emergency.
OK I wonder if there’s something wrong with the photo.
The photo:
WTF!!??
That’s like estimating the carbs in 2 slices of standard sandwich bread! Of course not all bread has the same amount of sugar, but a reasonable range based on an average should be a dead easy answer.
I thought the headline sounded crazy, but try to read the article, and it actually becomes worse. I have said it many times before, these AI chatbots should not be legal, they put lives at risk.
The apps are advertising that they can do this tho. Many of them are aggressively sponsoring YouTubers who advertise you can basically just wave your phone over the food and it takes away all the “work” from traditional calorie counting apps
Friendly reminder that LLMs don’t do math, they guess what number should come next, just like words.
It can probably link the image to the words “a photo of a sandwich on a plate”, and interpret the question as “how many calories are in a sandwich” but from there it is just guessing at the syntax of an answer, but not at finding any truth.
It knows sandwiches have calories and those tend to be 3-4 digit numbers, but also all numbers kinda look the same, so what’s to say it’s not 2, 5, or 12 digits?
Tool-powered agents can do math though. The issue is the fuzziness of it trying to guess carbs. It doesn’t know weight, ingredients, or anything other than a picture. These tools can be useful but not for this. Maybe one day but not yet.
Whoever claims an AI (LLM or agents) can do that and charging their users is lying and defrauding them.
What in the picture indicates any form of filling?
What you can see is cheese, there is probably butter too, but those 2 have zero carbohydrates, so adding carbohydrates based on filling would be pure speculation.
There are no carbohydrates to see beyond the bread.
There is no evidence of any filling, as there is zero bulge in the bread.
The answer should be based on what can be seen, with a remark to that effect, and that there possibly could be more if it contains filling that isn’t visible.
The AI could ask about a possible filling, instead of just making shit up with zero evidence.
If a friend texted me the same picture and question, I would do exactly what you described. Try to give a calculated guess that wouldn’t change.
Unless I was lazy and Googled it.
Google’s carbohydrate tool says 8g, then the AI overview goes on to contradict that by saying “A standard cheese sandwich typically contains between 25 and 35g.”
They put lives at risk the same way every single product at your local home improvement store does. When you misuse a tool for a purpose it wasn’t intended and isn’t good at, you’re going to get bad results.
This is an issue for the educational system, not the legal system.
And at the same time I wouldn’t say “hey fuck that, duct tape is terrible! It doesn’t hold beams together, I can’t use it to tow a trailer, it’s all just pretending to stick paper together because really every sliver of duct tape just sticks to the previous piece, etc etc” But that’s the cool thing we do on Lemmy.
I have not seen OpenAI advertise ChatGPT as capable of medical diagnosis or therapy or anything like that. If you want therapy, and you can’t afford better — because I think we can agree that AI is terrible at it, then there should be a therapy app with explicit safety controls.
The problem is someone created a screwdriver which is handy for lots of screwdriver shaped purposes and someone is trying to carve a ham.
Tools at home improvement stores were made to fulfill a specific purpose. GenAI still does not have a purpose it fulfills despite having hundreds of billions of dollars invested, not to mention all the other resources it’s sucking up.
A pencil is a tool with a pretty wide open purpose within the writing ecosystem. It can be used to document history or remember a phone number or draw a picture.
You can also stab yourself in the eye with it or plan a murder.
Yes, a pencil can do a whole bunch of different. things. GenAI cannot do things. It has no purpose. Pencils were made to write stuff. GenAI was made to ???. It is a technology in search of a problem to address. A niche to fill. It has no purpose as it stands, yet it is supposedly the most important thing ever to the point where the rich and wealthy are losing their minds investing into it on the vague hopes that it’ll do something. They’ve even got our government in on it; the US economy is being dangerously propped up by this industry that doesn’t solve any problems or fulfill any purpose. All the things it does are novelties and even then, it does those things poorly and unreliably.
OK I wonder if there’s something wrong with the photo.
The photo:
WTF!!??
That’s like estimating the carbs in 2 slices of standard sandwich bread! Of course not all bread has the same amount of sugar, but a reasonable range based on an average should be a dead easy answer.
I thought the headline sounded crazy, but try to read the article, and it actually becomes worse. I have said it many times before, these AI chatbots should not be legal, they put lives at risk.
To be fair there’s no way of knowing what the filling is, so the AI may be guessing based on that too
The apps are advertising that they can do this tho. Many of them are aggressively sponsoring YouTubers who advertise you can basically just wave your phone over the food and it takes away all the “work” from traditional calorie counting apps
Friendly reminder that LLMs don’t do math, they guess what number should come next, just like words.
It can probably link the image to the words “a photo of a sandwich on a plate”, and interpret the question as “how many calories are in a sandwich” but from there it is just guessing at the syntax of an answer, but not at finding any truth.
It knows sandwiches have calories and those tend to be 3-4 digit numbers, but also all numbers kinda look the same, so what’s to say it’s not 2, 5, or 12 digits?
Tool-powered agents can do math though. The issue is the fuzziness of it trying to guess carbs. It doesn’t know weight, ingredients, or anything other than a picture. These tools can be useful but not for this. Maybe one day but not yet.
Whoever claims an AI (LLM or agents) can do that and charging their users is lying and defrauding them.
But the ai assumes itself infallible, at least it could ask…
That’s true, it should ask follow-up questions, or at least clarify its assumptions
What in the picture indicates any form of filling?
What you can see is cheese, there is probably butter too, but those 2 have zero carbohydrates, so adding carbohydrates based on filling would be pure speculation.
There are no carbohydrates to see beyond the bread.
There is no evidence of any filling, as there is zero bulge in the bread.
The answer should be based on what can be seen, with a remark to that effect, and that there possibly could be more if it contains filling that isn’t visible.
The AI could ask about a possible filling, instead of just making shit up with zero evidence.
To your point -
If a friend texted me the same picture and question, I would do exactly what you described. Try to give a calculated guess that wouldn’t change.
Unless I was lazy and Googled it.
Google’s carbohydrate tool says 8g, then the AI overview goes on to contradict that by saying “A standard cheese sandwich typically contains between 25 and 35g.”
They put lives at risk the same way every single product at your local home improvement store does. When you misuse a tool for a purpose it wasn’t intended and isn’t good at, you’re going to get bad results.
This is an issue for the educational system, not the legal system.
As others have pointed out, this is also a problem with how they are advertising it.
If duct tape was advertised as something that you can use to hold your roof beams together, you’d have a issue with that.
And at the same time I wouldn’t say “hey fuck that, duct tape is terrible! It doesn’t hold beams together, I can’t use it to tow a trailer, it’s all just pretending to stick paper together because really every sliver of duct tape just sticks to the previous piece, etc etc” But that’s the cool thing we do on Lemmy.
The ad is bad, duct tape ain’t bad.
I have not seen OpenAI advertise ChatGPT as capable of medical diagnosis or therapy or anything like that. If you want therapy, and you can’t afford better — because I think we can agree that AI is terrible at it, then there should be a therapy app with explicit safety controls.
The problem is someone created a screwdriver which is handy for lots of screwdriver shaped purposes and someone is trying to carve a ham.
Tools at home improvement stores were made to fulfill a specific purpose. GenAI still does not have a purpose it fulfills despite having hundreds of billions of dollars invested, not to mention all the other resources it’s sucking up.
Nonsense.
It does a great job of scamming idiots (mainly investors and CEOs) and lining the pockets of the scammers selling it, which is all it’s designed for.
It’s 100% fulfilling its purpose, it’s just not the purpose they claim to be selling it for.
A pencil is a tool with a pretty wide open purpose within the writing ecosystem. It can be used to document history or remember a phone number or draw a picture.
You can also stab yourself in the eye with it or plan a murder.
Yes, a pencil can do a whole bunch of different. things. GenAI cannot do things. It has no purpose. Pencils were made to write stuff. GenAI was made to ???. It is a technology in search of a problem to address. A niche to fill. It has no purpose as it stands, yet it is supposedly the most important thing ever to the point where the rich and wealthy are losing their minds investing into it on the vague hopes that it’ll do something. They’ve even got our government in on it; the US economy is being dangerously propped up by this industry that doesn’t solve any problems or fulfill any purpose. All the things it does are novelties and even then, it does those things poorly and unreliably.