this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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AI is amazing. It can detect cancer. Find new chemical composites for undiscovered medicine. It can solve unsolved problems in astronomy. It optimizes logistics and productions in ways that discriminative algorithms would never be able to.
Every single rebuttal that you did does not paint humans in a good light. Why did the doctor perform further said testing to verify the cancer? Because an AI predict it. And we prefer more false positives than false negatives, so we test the positive.
Testing for medicine as poison will be done no matter if it was found by humans or not. Searching for potential medicine faster is a welcome in my book. Rather than finding being the bottleneck, I'd rather test be the bottleneck. It means we will have a potential answer than none at all.
As for the astronomer case, it is true for every field. Cancer detection? Ideally, a doctor/medical technician feed the AI the data, and the doctor must also check the output of said AI. A simple X-ray scan with a marker marked as cancer will have a lot of parameters that the doctor could understand that a layman may not. Maybe it is the size, maybe it is the opacity, maybe it is the location, and many other things.
Aye, sure, but you don't check the result of calculations manually, do you, because you trust the calculator.
Similarly, you probably don't stress test every joint on every car you get into, do you?
My point being that there is a point at which you do trust the tool sufficiently.
Is it at the state of cancer diagnosis? Definitely not. How about cooking? Yes, pretty much it is. I trust it more or less when cooking and making drinks.
I've also gotten a ton of actually helpfil medical information that real life doctors fucked up.
So yeah one should be critical but just don't be a complete luddite.
Do you know what else is math? Probability and statistics. AI cannot do math because it is not a suitable task for it. Seriously, who TF thinks that a rigorous well defined process should be fed into a statistical blackbox.
Do you know what else the engineer uses to optimize a product design? The answer may surprise you...
But unless your using an actual abacus, the person who built your calculator, or more likely programmed the OS you're running a calculator software on, you're still using a product made by a fallible person and which could have made a mistake.
Then neither can basic calculators. Or your trying to say that sometimes the input isn't clear enough for the AI to get the corrected calculation it could do correctly. Ie the interface is still unreliable.
But at some point, it will be reliable enough. And it's already reliable enough for cooking. It can still make mistakes, but if you understand the basics, you'll realise if there's some massive hallucination.
Ah, so the minimum wage people actually putting the cars together (there's one factory I know not far from me which every single one of my immigrant friends has been at for a week or two) are infallible, because engineering is โ at its core โ based on math?
You know you seem just as ridiculous as the guy you were arguing, who's claiming LLM's will cure cancer.
"Engineering is math and math is math thus all engineered products and all engineered software is perfect and infallible ... except for anything AI, WHICH IS TO BE BURNED AS HERECY."
;>
You misunderstand. It's not because the AI is better at medicine. It's because it's a tool which has got access to medical information, and the doctors I used were public doctors who dismissed me. Something again which you somehow think of as impossible, as your "brain has gone soft" and suffers from the just world fallacy.
With the aid of LLM's, I could actually input very medical questions, which the doctors would've probably known how to answer, had they actually listened to what I was saying. You're completely ignoring arrogance, bureaucracy, racism, sexism and agism.
If you want, I'll eat wheat right now and show you how I'll start having a high blood pressure, high HR, extremely anxiety and shitting orange floaty poop. Despite that, I have a doctors statement saying the test for celiacs is negative. We took the antigen test after I asked the doctor whether the antigen test actually requires being exposed in case of a false negative, as I was already avoiding gluten since I know to be allergic to it. She said "no it doesn't". After the test came back negative, she messaged me, indirectly admitting she had made a mistake. Now I've a complaint going on about her but these take literally years to process.
Ofc it was directed at you. You're a mindless softbrain who just has to be in the "anti-AI" bandwagon, because you're not capable of forming your own opinions, so you always just trail others and shout out what you think is the most successful thing you've heard. And you still use them, despite taking a stance like that in public. It's pathetic, really. I hope you grow out of it.
So you are saying that because cars are designed by engineers, you don't need to check that the brakes work, because engineering is magic and you trust it.
Are you talking about manual or digital calculators?
What happens when you divide by zero on a mechanical calculator?
Now unless you're using a machine in which you can clearly see every single part of it, such as an abacus, you can't be 100% sure it's actually working correctly. You may reliably assume that of such a base level of technology as calculators, and of calculator software on your PC/phone, and you may also somewhat reliably trust that a car is in working order.
However, in my country the law actually does mention that you're required to check that all lights, indicators, and safety equipment functions before going out on the road, but if everyone actually did that everywhere in the world, the whole gimmick of cutting brake lines wouldn't exist.
Now is AI way more unreliable, and actually hallucinates things? Yes. But were search engines pretty much equally unreliable in the early days of the world wide web? Also yes. That's why you still hear people sneering "oh, did you Google that?". Yes, obviously I used a search engine to search for information, but I also known how to verify the sources of any information I find with it.
The modern version is LLM, a few years back it was "oh did you read that on Wikipedia" and before that is was general derision at all search engines.
As if someone actually fucking took the time to walk to a library anymore to spend an hour looking at books which might talk about the subject you have a question about and might be several decades old and have out of date information.
The "tldr" or "do your own research" of the pseudointellectual. I'm confident you're perfectly capable of understanding what I said. You just don't want to answer because it'd show your logic sucks and you can't form your own opinions.
Yes, medicine works through diagnosis... which the AI did... We prefer false positives so the doctor may or may not perform further inspection, but it was diagnosed/flagged nonetheless. That doctor has a second opinion just with a computer instead of talking with his peers which may be busy. And I did not said that the doctor will trust the output blindly aren't I? That's why no layman should operate the AI as I said.
Well, then that is not the fault of the AI. Why did humans act irrational as you said? The AI is just trained that way. Maybe train another AI on another data then? The concept clearly works because in the 75 years we have 15 out of 15 billion, and not maybe thousand potential from a handful of manual research which still also needs to be tested.
Your point does not make sense because if AI cannot do all of that, then every early cancer diagnosis being made by a computer is not worth checking. Those 15 compounds are BS. And astronomy may be wrong. As you clearly stated yourself, AI is damn good at detecting patterns that a human may miss. If that does not mean an AI is capable of something, then I don't know what is.
It can detect cancer. The need for double checking or verification is just that: double checking and verification. But the AI detected it. You know what "detect" means right?
It can also find chemical compounds for medicine. It needs to be tested like every other medicine found by humans. But it was found by the AI nontheless.
AI can make discoveries in space that no human or discriminative algorithm would ever be able to do. Do you know how big space is? And how much data is available for inference? Exponential discriminative algorithms (or even worse humans) would take billions of years finding things that generative algorithms can find in hours. It's an incredibly valuable tool. More valuable than the telescopes themselves.
Your comment shows that you have no technical understanding of the technology. You project LLMs on AI in general and don't realize that AI has been around being productive for the past 50 years. AI is the next step of evolution. Like fire, agriculture or electricity. It will make life so much faster, more efficient and more productive. It has already enabled us to accomplish and discover amazing things and it will only accelerate.
The doctor needs to do the diagnosis. The AI detects it. AI is definitely used like that. And not just somewhere. AI is being used widely in the health sector. So it's not just some bullshit. It's actually useful. You have no idea what you're talking about.
You seem to be a bit confused. Nobody said anything about replacing doctors. And insurancr companies weren't even mentioned.
How do you even "support" that? What are you saying? Neural networks have neen around for longer than you've been alive for. It's being used fucking everywhere. And not just yesterday but for many years now.
Remove AI (neural networks) from existence and you wouldn't have the following:
You're just completely delusional and mad because you read something about LLMs on the internet. You're the one who's religiously attacking something so ambiguous and ubiquitous while not having any technical understanding about the underlying technology.
Explain to me how transformers, RNNs, or CNNs work and we can keep this discussion up.
Alright, fair point that it is detection and not diagnosis even if it means being pedantic. But everything else that an AI capable of is also not to be dismissed.
but the article talks about gen ai specifically so im also talking about gen ai specifically
So why did the commenter generalize to AI then?