Bad uses / over-promised of AI

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kingdragonfly

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#319900 12-Jun-2025 19:38

I thought I'd start this thread about bad use / over promised uses of AI.

I know a company that does real estate price valuations. After hiring a number of PhD's and spending a fortune on AI, ordinary statistical analysis still more accurate than the AI models.

Here's another example, of a 80 move chess game

Power Usage of an Atari 2600: 5 watt-hours (Wh)

Power Usage of ChatGPT: 40 to 80 Wh or more

ChatGPT Defeated at Chess by 1970s-Era Atari 2600: Cnet
...
By using a software emulator to run Atari's 1979 game Video Chess, Citrix engineer Robert Caruso said he was able to set up a match between ChatGPT and the 46-year-old game. The matchup did not go well for ChatGPT.

"ChatGPT confused rooks for bishops, missed pawn forks and repeatedly lost track of where pieces were -- first blaming the Atari icons as too abstract, then faring no better even after switching to standard chess notations," Caruso wrote in a LinkedIn post.

"It made enough blunders to get laughed out of a 3rd-grade chess club," Caruso said. "ChatGPT got absolutely wrecked at the beginner level."
...

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#3383370 12-Jun-2025 20:03

So an app that wasn't designed to play chess was defeated by one that was?

My 2024 keyboard is way worse at hitting in a nail than my 1990s hammer ...

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timmmay

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#3383388 12-Jun-2025 21:29

GenAI has its uses. You can't trust what it says, you need to validate it, but it can produce useful research, useful code, and even helps with TV show and movie selection. It's not good at everything though.

Tinkerisk

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#3383419 13-Jun-2025 00:12

That‘s what AGI is for. 😎

It passes the medical university exams at the first attempt, but is not reliable enough when diagnosing patients.

Qui nihil scit, omnia credere debet. - He who knows nothing must believe everything.
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Handle9

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#3383448 13-Jun-2025 06:31

This thread title should have been passed to AI so it made sense.

Handle9

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#3383450 13-Jun-2025 06:33

What is the point of this thread compared to the other thread OP has posted on AI? Couldn’t they be combined?

muppet

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#3383455 13-Jun-2025 07:44

Back when I started in networking (1998, I'm OLD) all the old guys at the time I worked with thought that "IP" was really a load of overhyped bollocks. You couldn't do Voice over it, it was unreliable (it was at the time) and they just couldn't see how it was going to be long-term relevant against "proper" TDM stuff like ATM, Frame-Relay and the big important thing at the time, SDH. They could always find, and would happily point out, flaws in IP and its associated routing protocols (RIP was very common then).

The fact the whole industry was talking about it etc just annoyed and upset them further.

I feel the same mentality "haha look at this stupid thing" is here today with "AI"/LLMs. I reckon this article does a good job of speaking to many of the points (Especially in coding) of AI usage etc.

I am of course sick to death of hearing about AI, but show me someone who isn't.

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gehenna

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#3383465 13-Jun-2025 08:22

It's interesting to me that there are threads here about the negatives of AI but I recall seeing few about the benefits. It's an interesting vibe to observe having lived through the web, mobile, and cloud transitions. The general excitement and optimism that used to be synonymous with geekdom seems a thing of the past as relates to AI. Fascinating really. I'm generally quite pessimistic about AI in my personal life, but I certainly have seen transformatively positive impacts in a work and vocational environments, beyond just an annoying Copilot integration in Office, I mean. I'm looking forward to more of those stories coming out and hopefully balancing out the wider narrative, but I don't anticipate it happening outside of work use cases for a long time.

kingdragonfly

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#3383467 13-Jun-2025 08:28

Most non-techies don't understand that AI isn't for everything.

ChatGPT has processed billions of gratitude messages since launch ("Thank you", Thanks" " I appreciate it").

Estimated total energy (1 GWh) for these pointless requests.

That's enough to power about 90 homes for a year.

Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to restart to power Microsoft AI operations: The Guardian

A nuclear reactor at the notorious Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania is to be activated for the first time in five years after its owners, Constellation Energy, struck a deal to provide power to Microsoft’s proliferating artificial intelligence operations.

The plant was the location of the most serious nuclear meltdown and radiation leak in US history, in March 1979 when the loss of water coolant through a faulty valve caused the Unit 2 reactor to overheat.
...

gehenna

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#3383468 13-Jun-2025 08:31

Yep and the frustrating thing is you have Sam Altman saying "don't be polite, it costs heaps" and then in the other breath you have OpenAI posting screenshots of polite conversations and their responses on social media to further push the anthropormorphic narrative. Pick a lane, folks.

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#3383471 13-Jun-2025 08:43

blackjack17:

So an app that wasn't designed to play chess was defeated by one that was?

My 2024 keyboard is way worse at hitting in a nail than my 1990s hammer ...

Your 2024 keyboard doesn't cheerily tell you that it IS good at hitting in nails though!

kingdragonfly

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#3383472 13-Jun-2025 08:43

If you want to see real life problems now, ask Chatgpt.com this request

"current research and real-world examples about mental health issues, like messiah complex, delusions, or excessive dependency, linked to abuse or overuse of AI"

There are plenty of mental health professional worried that AI doesn't realize a person is in real trouble mentally, and instead encourages it.

Rolling Stones has one, for the laypersons

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies: Rolling Stones

Less than a year after marrying a man she had met at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Kat felt tension mounting between them. ... But by 2022, her husband “was using AI to compose texts to me and analyze our relationship” the 41-year-old mom and education nonprofit worker tells Rolling Stone. Previously, he had used AI models for an expensive coding camp that he had suddenly quit without explanation — then it seemed he was on his phone all the time, asking his AI bot “philosophical questions,” trying to train it “to help him get to ‘the truth,’” Kat recalls. His obsession steadily eroded their communication as a couple.

When Kat and her husband separated in August 2023, she entirely blocked him apart from email correspondence. ... She finally got him to meet her at a courthouse this past February, where he shared “a conspiracy theory about soap on our foods” but wouldn’t say more, as he felt he was being watched. They went to a Chipotle, where he demanded that she turn off her phone, again due to surveillance concerns. Kat’s ex told her that he’d “determined that statistically speaking, he is the luckiest man on Earth,” that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler,” and that he had learned of profound secrets “so mind-blowing I couldn’t even imagine them.” He was telling her all this, he explained, because although they were getting divorced, he still cared for her.

“In his mind, he’s an anomaly,” Kat says. “That in turn means he’s got to be here for some reason. He’s special and he can save the world.” After that disturbing lunch, she cut off contact with her ex. “The whole thing feels like Black Mirror,” she says. “He was always into sci-fi, and there are times I wondered if he’s viewing it through that lens.”

Kat was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament, as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.
...

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alasta

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#3383475 13-Jun-2025 08:58

Strava's "Athlete Intelligence" is the worst. It comes up with all sorts of drivel that adds no insight at all.

Last weekend I was running into a 50km/h southerly headwind with a -3 degree windchill. Strava knows this because it records the weather conditions against the activity. Athlete intelligence helpfully told me that I was "slower than usual" and was "pushing into higher heartrate zones" with no mention of the most important contextual information - the extreme weather.

muppet

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#3383476 13-Jun-2025 08:58

There is an invisible sky person that watches over everyone and, based on if you believe and/or please him, you get to go to a magical place once you die: Perfectly normal thing to say.

The AI told me I'm a sky god person: AI IS OUT OF CONTROL!!!!