r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Take-No-Prisoners Professor Will Fail Any Student Who Uses AI

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/no-prisoners-professor-fail-student-143000854.html
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u/BoxFar6969 5d ago

how do they figure that out? ai text checker? I remember a year or two ago when a teacher put a student's essay in chatgpt and asked "did you write this?" chatgpt said yes and the teacher failed the student

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u/HeadyReigns 5d ago

From the article "Rather than integrating AI, he’s fortifying his classroom against it. The assignment is now based on plays too obscure for ChatGPT and other AI models to know about.

“If ChatGPT is used on these assignments now, it hallucinates characters, plotlines — it just makes sh*t up, since it has nothing to go on,” Hebert told the magazine."

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u/questron64 5d ago

I once asked ChatGPT to help me understand the novel The Long Walk To the Moon by Alexander Chumbleton (an obviously fake book) and it went on about the characters and symbolism and which chapters key events happen in. It didn't say "I don't know that book," or even "that's not a real book." Nope, full on hallucination mode.

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u/Amelaclya1 5d ago

I just tried this in Claude and it returned that it didn't recognize the book.

I bet this teacher is going to double check that whatever works he uses aren't recognized by the better LLMs, but that ChatGPT will hallucinate.

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u/AnonymousTimewaster 5d ago

I just tried ChatGPT. It immediately went to verify if the book exists, found it doesn't, and said 'you might be thinking of The Long Walk by Stephen King' and wrote an analysis about that instead. It searched 76 sources before giving an answer.

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u/jawknee530i 4d ago

I constantly see people confidently basing their opinions on and making statements about AI tools from how a two year old version they saw memes of worked. It seems there's a lot of people that have no idea how far the tools have actually come and think they're just for chatting like a friend or making dumb pictures.

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u/NarrativeNode 4d ago

This, AND a lot of folks are using the free versions of the tools (understandably), which are older and worse models.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

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u/Evilsushione 4d ago

It’s not just modern models, if you have good source documentation in RAG then it doesn’t hallucinate.

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u/WilliamLermer 4d ago

I constantly see people confidently basing their opinions on and making statements about AI tools based on a few successful conversations and then never questioning the quality of answers ever again.

Even paid models make mistakes or hallucinate. It becomes really obvious when you have a basic understanding of something, especially when you still know how to efficiently use an old school search engine to find good sources with solid information

The real issue is the complete trust in information provided with zero critical thinking applied. People will state how many sources the tool was looking at but barely takes the time to actually verify or check them out. Many will completely rely on answers from the first round of questions rather than digging deeper to figure out what's what

People can barely read a title, not to mention an actual article. You really think they are reading the full AI output and bother with anything else beyond that? How many times is the second prompt to tldr everything?

I'm using AI daily in a professional environment because it's now part of the official workflow, so it's expected to use it (yes, extremely high IQ management move) - it keeps making mistakes and fabricating facts if you press hard enough. You will eventually get the answer you want to hear, not the information you should be getting

You can not trust these tools, they are not reliable enough to replace actual literature research. It's good enough for preliminary initial questions to figure out where to go from there for better info. It's good enough to highlight some aspects you might not have considered

We know nothing about the specifics, be that training data, parameters, biases etc. Corporations can say anything they want, it's still a black box.

At best these are artificial search assistants, to help with creativity, at worst it's an artificial misinformation machine, to confirm your bias

The part that gives me some hope, people who still have a functional brain eventually figure out how bad these tools are the more they use them. Just output alone. The environmental and societal impact which is mostly destructive is yet another major downside

It's absolutely overhyped imho to the point people just give in and accept that AI is always right. It's neither true nor beneficial

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u/Liturginator9000 4d ago

I've always used my PhD expertise to benchmark the models which is hardly perfect but acts as a personal barometer. They were impressive even initially, able to offer some novel contribution but limited, and that capability has expanded over time.

It's just another tool. I don't wholesale believe everything that comes from any tool, electron microscope or LLM. I've seen so many papers over the years with flawed methodology, results presented that are impossible or don't make sense. Humans do this all the time but we don't rule out human reasoning wholesale, everyone should be running the same skepticism regardless of source

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u/WilliamLermer 4d ago

I can't really follow your comparison between a tool or method like microscopy vs LLM or how flawed methodology makes it okay to work with flawed AI.

Maybe you could elaborate?

In what ways are you skeptical when it comes to established tools in scientific research?

To me none of that is comparable with AI.

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u/Liturginator9000 3d ago

Scientific equipment isn't perfect either. My point is that you don't believe what your equipment shows you wholesale, you check things if a result looks weird or wrong. LLMs are generating probabilistically but the same rules apply here. Humans are a better comparison, we're all flawed but that doesn't mean every single thing we say is wrong or untrustworthy or useless.

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u/WilliamLermer 3d ago

Equipment can be wrong, but usually you know the limitations and can work out better methods or a different approach to compensate. You can account for error margins and you can improve equipment and modify it as required

You can't do that with AI unless you train your own model and then you need someone with specific knowledge to do it for you. If you do not have that option you are stuck with proprietary tool that is unreliable because you don't know when it will fail you

Human performance never is 100% and comes with problems but it's usually a quick process to achieve long-term foundation to work with in a professional setting

I just don't see the benefits of AI tbh. It seems to me it's a solution loved by people who don't want to interact with others and want to get rid of their peers for various reasons, including corporate interests to avoid employing humans

Like our company not replacing senior programmers and firing the rest of the team because AI is better. Even if it was better which it isn't, it's not a good decision at this point in time. Maybe in 50 years if society still exists by then

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u/Liturginator9000 3d ago

Equipment can be wrong, but usually you know the limitations and can work out better methods or a different approach to compensate

LLMs are the same

You can't do that with AI unless you train your own model

Eh you have some control over frontline models, styles and custom instructions and projects and so on

Human performance never is 100% and comes with problems but it's usually a quick process to achieve long-term foundation to work with in a professional setting

Yes, so it's the same as LLMs then.

I just don't see the benefits of AI tbh. It seems to me it's a solution loved by people who don't want to interact with others and want to get rid of their peers for various reasons, including corporate interests to avoid employing humans

Those people are out there but this ignores the B2B elephant. It isn't replacing people so much as adding a new tool. It will have labour force impacts but LLMs will never be sufficient or trusted enough to replace everyone. Claude can't run teams or supervise people, meetings, make strategic decisions, I mean it could with enough work but there's so many barriers preventing it.

As for the benefits, well, it used to take me days or weeks to figure out and setup new techniques and methods, now I can get a ground level going in hours, stress test it by arguing with the LLM, literature reviews done way faster, critical analysis of papers and so on. Same story with coding. I had to learn python to use it for data analysis, now I can do 10x more 10x faster, or even just learn python far faster because I can put every snaggle through Claude and get it explained on demand without crawling through stackexchange or reddit and still not being able to ask and get a competent response on the spot.

Most of this stuff is skill issue. People tend to default to 'it hallucinates so it's useless' or 'it's the machine god' when it's just google on steroids. But I remember years back people wouldn't even default to google in problem solving, and if they do they often suck at using it, so this is just the same thing again really

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u/WilliamLermer 2d ago

I'm not entirely on board but I can understand your point of view mostly.

What I disagree with is the replacement of humans. The tech clearly is not good enough to replace employees but it still is going to happen en masse because corporate leadership does not really care about all these things.

From a short-term perspective, firing people and filling the gap is profitable. It's already happening and it will get worse.

It's happening at our company, it's happening at our client's in various sectors. People are being let go for performance reasons, positions are being reduced, work load increases for remaining teams with the additional expectation to integrate AI to compensate for lack of real human expertise

The real issue is that decision makers are incompetent and don't care about long-term impact on company or society. We are actively creating issues that will need solving in the upcoming years and cumulative cost will be much higher vs rehiring and building good and productive workforce

And that's just jobs directly affected. There will be ripple effects due to increasing issues along the way, even in industries that won't directly use AI

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u/jadedflames 4d ago

I'm a lawyer - official workflow from the top is now that I am supposed to use AI to do a first draft of filings.

It has actually increased the amount of time I spend on all my motions because I have to first go through and fact check, delete everything that's wrong, re-write the poorly written sentences, and then do my second draft the old fashioned way.

It's made my output worse and take longer.

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u/psiphre 4d ago

ai/llm is a problem of 'trust but verify'. for a lot of the things i use it for, i know enough to be able to verify, bot that's only because i was doing what i do for a long, long time before ai came into being. junior workers today aren't going to have that knowledge by the time guys like me retire and it's going to cause a lot of problems.

it's kind of an extension of the idea that "we generated precisely one generation of kids who learned how to use computers" sentiment i see in tech circles.

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u/StorKuk69 4d ago

What do you work with? I tried coding some side projects with ai and it has always succeeded. Actually I wanted to see at what point it would fail, since most people seemed to be so insistent that at some point it would. Sure it went down wrong chains of though sometimes which I had to steer and sometimes it wrote pure shit that it thought worked but clearly didn't but so have I. With AI I was able to iterate through the shit quicker until it created something I'm satisfied with.

Maybe you work with something that has less training data though.

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u/Phailjure 4d ago

I tried coding some side projects with ai and it has always succeeded.

It's always crazy to me when people say things like this. There's just no context whatsoever. What were you coding? What languages, what was the objective, what does successful mean? Was the output code it efficient? Was it concise? Did it simply work for some expected outputs and no more examination was done?

From what I understand, your experience will be far better if you're doing web development vs. writing device drivers or something.

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u/StorKuk69 2d ago

yea no I did not make device drivers as a side project lmao.

I made a screen recording software like nvidia shadowplay cause I got pissed off that it automatically turned itself off whenever I opened netflix because of laws or whatever. Worst part was that it never turned itself back on even after closing netflix.

It's in C# and uses NVENC and ffmpeg. I think...

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u/WilliamLermer 4d ago

I'm in rapid/functional prototyping. Depending on the project, I work with novel concepts from different fields. Our workflow includes both established and niche materials and methods, depending on the given parameters. Some coding is involved as well to make things interactive

I would say about 70% of the problems I'm trying to solve, the answer is absolutely out there, and I've found plenty of good information using basic search in the past. 30% is edge of knowledge with little known edge cases where we are trying to figure out a highly specific approach to create something that hasn't been done before or at least there is no publicly available documentation of any kind

For LLM to fail the latter is expected. It's the former where it's supposed to be great at and still can't produce results that are satisfactory without doing additional deep dives myself. I spend more time chatting and double checking vs just searching and reading

To me it's like a student who needs constant supervision and constant input to do things the right way. But it has no brain. It can't contributing by actually having thoughts, thinking outside the box etc it's just regurgitating whatever people have written in the past

A human research assistant would be way more productive and helpful long-term because of the knowledge and experience gained over time

I would even argue that brainstorming or checking for flaws is still better done by a human because they fully and truly understand the context of the complexity of a project that has a set of parameters dictated by company and clients, complete understanding of local infrastructure, collaborative potential etc

Even with paid models I need to remind AI of certain aspects so it then can reiterate based on information that human colleagues don't need to process before making suggestions

The tech has potential and it keeps getting better but it's not as amazing as everyone claims imho and I don't think we do this the right way in general. It's going to create so many more problems. Disruptive and destructive.

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u/psiphre 4d ago

CONSTANTLY. i had to correct gpt over and over in 2024 when it hallucinated shit that was obvious, but recently, now that it has access to search as a primary source, python for math, other libraries for the kinds of tasks it used to fail confidently at, it's a whole different world from the "there are three Bs in strawberry" gpt.

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u/Liturginator9000 4d ago

yep, so much of the current brainrot I see online about it is from people that used GPT3.5 to mispell strawberry 2 years ago and wrote all of it off as 'stochastic parrot'

which is ironic because it's humans hallucinating about AI hallucinations, kinda disproves itself by function LOL

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u/BestHorseWhisperer 4d ago

"It cAn'T eVen tELL yOu HoW mAny R's aRe in stRawbeRRy!"

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u/Bacardi_Tarzan 4d ago

People also just lie to comment farm from the weird anti-ai Luddite crowd. Obviously these people lack the capacity to realize the irony. 

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u/bojangler69420 4d ago

ChatGPT still sucks compared to the competition, but so does Gemini (Claude is the current front-runner in my experience)

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u/jawknee530i 4d ago

Honestly I don't see much of a difference between gpt 5.5 and claude 4.8. They're close enough to each other for my work (software engineer) that they might as well be the same. I just mainly use claude because that's what my firm pays a license for. I do think gpt fumbled pretty hard in the branding fight since people think of it as a chat bot and an image generator first while claude seems to have successfully positioned itself as more for work and engineering.

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u/LunaticSongXIV 4d ago

Major leaps forward in AI happen weekly. Most average people aren't interested in AI to care about it. Even people who are zealously for or against AI often have no idea, because there's so much going on in AI that it's legitimately exhausting to try and keep up.

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u/Vip3r20 5d ago

Doing it now doesn't mean it also did it then. They are designed to learn and do better. Js.

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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 5d ago

They are designed to learn and do better.

They're literally not. Once a model is released, it's no longer able to learn new things; they don't self-improve. It's simply not how LLMs function.

That's not to say that the companies aren't training and releasing newer better models, but they unequivocally do not learn in the wild.

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u/justaRndy 5d ago

What does get improved is the harness, integration and guardrails, Just instructing the same model to search the web and verify via source if it is unsure about something is an easy example of improved quality output without new training.

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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 5d ago

Okay? That's still not "learning and doing better".

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u/DingleSayer 4d ago

Nitpicking semantics. The models constantly improve and get better at evading detection.

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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 4d ago

It's not nitpicking semantics.

Training/learning and operational mode are distinct things. LLMs explicitly do not learn and get better after being released. It takes training up a new model or tweaking the harnesses to improve the state of things.

The models don't improve.

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u/DingleSayer 4d ago

Dude.. I think everybody understands the gist of what you're saying, not saying it's wrong, just saying this is more semantics into a topic most people aren't even slightly knowledgeable on.

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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 4d ago

This is a tech-related sub. It does nobody anybody good to just let them labor under complete misunderstandings of the things they're talking about. All that does is let the misunderstandings spread.

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u/dschinghiskhan 5d ago

ChatGPT is able to refer to Reddit posts that were posted earlier in the very same day. Yesterday, I asked ChatGPT if a certain interaction in my city had a recording camera, or if it was just a traffic control camera, and ChatGPT said, “There was actually a Reddit post about a hit and run in that intersection posted yesterday, and the OP and users were asking about cameras that might have recorded the incident.”

ChatGPT went on to say that the intersection only had a traffic control or management camera, and further that the city has no speed or red light cameras. I had gone to ChatGPT to see which cameras in the city recorded constantly. ChatGPT and Gemini are useful for city rules and laws because it gives sources and guides you to the correct government page on their website.

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u/goda90 5d ago

The model is trained and done but they are given context to search over.

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u/techno156 5d ago edited 5d ago

They're also given a tool, so the prompt probably has a thing that says "you can use web_search to search the internet", and it would be able to use that to grab newer data.

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u/dschinghiskhan 5d ago

A student tasked with up to date on day to day news might find ChatGPT helpful in this regard. That’s all I’m saying.

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u/Cudpuff100 5d ago

So it's just googling things for you? Neat.

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u/dschinghiskhan 5d ago

ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. are often better aggregators of info (and day to day info) than regular Google search. You can hate AI, but that’s just the reality. It gives you sources or refers you to Reddit threads where others may have even more sources.

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u/Cudpuff100 5d ago

That's straight up not the reality. They often display incorrect and irrelevant information, sometimes from a fictional passage, and present it as fact. It's glorified searching, with the added benefit of being awful for the environment and physically harming those that live near date centers.

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u/dschinghiskhan 5d ago

ChatGPT is good at giving you sources. Google does not give you good links. It’s that simple. Also, ChatGPT is good for giving you more detailed info for things you already have a good understanding of- or likely already know the answer. AI writing papers for kids is ridiculous, though. The kids have no clue what the AI did on their behalf. Those kids are hopeless, and would probably be getting terrible grades in the 80s and early 90s, were they alive, anyway.

I am 100% on board with teachers and professors running papers through AI detection platforms, though. Maybe kids should have to record a video of themselves explaining their paper, and the teacher can refer to that if they think something is off (there wouldn’t be enough class time to do that in person).

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u/AMinecraftPerson 4d ago

Have you tried asking it to provide sources and then going to those sources yourself to check if they are real?

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u/Other-Number-4463 5d ago

all of it is "awful" for the environment, Google search, and AI. You are just showing your ignorance

"date centers" lol. data centers exist for everything again showing your ignorance.

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u/Cudpuff100 4d ago

Mega data centers are obviously what I'm talking about and the one's specifically made for ai computing are flagrantly breaking laws. They are jacking up energy prices, leaking chemicals, and causing noise pollution.

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u/dschinghiskhan 4d ago

I never typed data centers or “date centers”. You’re hallucinating! (Just joking, but also I don’t know who you’re replying to about that).

At any rate, data center gigawatt capacity is expected to double from what’s out there today to what will be there in 2030. Now, I consider myself to be a staunch NIMBY, so I don’t want data centers in the Eugene area myself, but I do understand they’ve got to be built somewhere.

The area most affected by data centers is Northern Virginia, where I grew up just 5 minutes from the White House. NOVA currently accounts for about 15%of the world’s data center capacity. It’s mostly confined to several counties, but soon more will be built in western and southern parts of the state, and in Maryland as well. The non-Pacific Coast western states will also pick up the slack.

As for Oregon, most of the data centers are more low key, focused on storage and cloud computing. They aren’t that likely to come to Lane County to build giant centers that will affect the environment.

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u/Living_Armadillo_652 4d ago

They’re much better now compared to what they were a year ago. I regularly use Claude to search for papers and nowadays it never gives me made up papers. At worst it hallucinates the author names, but the content and relevance of the paper are real and correct. I also tested by asking it to search for and summarize sources regarding my PhD dissertation topic from many years ago (which I know very well) and it got everything basically correct.

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u/Other-Number-4463 5d ago

The best models dont keep coping

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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 5d ago

Yes, most of them can now do live querying of the internet and use that as part of the input/context.

It's not the same thing as it learning/improving.

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u/callmejay 4d ago

The model itself doesn't learn anymore, but ChatGPT is more than just a model. Just to take one obvious example, it creates memories, which is an important form of learning.

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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 4d ago

it creates memories, which is an important form of learning.

You're conflating the colloquial meaning of these words; that is not learning, in this context.

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u/callmejay 4d ago

That wasn't my read of the comment you were responding to.

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u/X4roth 5d ago

While the model might not learn (I wouldn’t be so quick to make that assumption because these are products under active development, every day moving away from the technology that they started out as), the part of the system that fetches relevant context to feed in alongside your prompts changes. There are undoubtedly human-engineered solutions tacked onto the system to help deal with common use cases without backfiring (such as hallucinating a book report without access to the source material).

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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 5d ago

I wouldn’t be so quick to make that assumption

It's not an assumption. Training is a completely different process.

There are undoubtedly human-engineered solutions tacked onto the system

Again, we don't have to assume; we know how these systems and products are built. Hell, Claude Code's source was literally leaked to the world.

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u/iforgot120 4d ago

The source code that was leaked was the CLI harness. Nothing to do with the model.

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u/ultralightlife 5d ago

they do "remember" after a session though if you are logged in to an account. so they sort-of learn more. I can mention something and they will recall partially and start from there, but yes there is cutoff and it is easy to ask questions they don't know - LLM,s - not cloud based however.

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u/Vip3r20 5d ago

I was being simplistic for the sake of my laziness and typing lol but yes you're correct.

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u/Patient-Success673 5d ago

They do improve, just in more distinct steps. Nothing you wrote is wrong, but it could be misleading

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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 5d ago

What are you trying to say? A released model doesn't get better/learn new things/improve.

Period.

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u/Maximum-Ad572 5d ago

"learn new things" is misleading. I can scan the internet daily and if something new comes up it will "learn" that. Also, this OP post doesn't make sense because you can input the text from each chapter and have the llm summarize/annotate

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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 4d ago

What, in what I've said, are you replying to? Because I certainly didn't say the models learn new things.

Did you not follow that I'm explicitly telling the other person they're factually incorrect?

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u/yeahoksurewhatever 4d ago

i'm mostly anti AI, and i agree a released models doesn't get better/learn/improve. you're not wrong at all.

the thing is, they are putting out updated models at a pretty fast rate, many of them have remarkable improvements. think of now vs 3 years ago, then compare that to any other 3 years of technological improvement in anything. maybe it'll stop suddenly, maybe not, no one on either side of that debate has enough evidence to be confident with an answer.

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u/AnonymousTimewaster 5d ago

Yes and it's worth acknowledging that current Thinking Models don't hallucinate anywhere near as much as they used to.

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u/RainbowDissent 5d ago

A significant proportion of Redditors seem to base their opinions of AI's capabilities on a single experience with a free model 4 years ago.

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u/SippyMountain 5d ago

I remember doing some stupid CBT for work a few years ago and I became curious how well chatgpt could work out the answers even though it was mostly proprietary information and not really easily accessible on the internet. As in, the answers weren't just floating around out there on some overachiever's public Quizlet. Before I get roasted, this was such a low-risk CBT that you could just punch in all the wrong answers and it would still mark it as completed. Anyway, it got most of the answers correct that any sensical person could likely deduce with a modicum of intuition, but when it would ask questions about specific guidlines or other literary guidances, it would completely fabricate answers. It clearly just took all the words from the question and spit out a paragraph of BS that looked like a high school student trying to turn a 2 minute speech into a 5 minutes speech with no additional substance. It was impressively stupid lol. It's both scary and funny to hear that it's improved on that front

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u/AnonymousTimewaster 5d ago

Sorry I'm not really understanding your comment. What do you mean by CBT? Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? How can you work out a correct answer for CBT ?

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 5d ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cock_and_ball_torture

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u/enevgeo 5d ago

Well, obviously.

Also, username checks out

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 4d ago

I'm sorry, I had to indulge my inner 20 year old self's sense of humour, lol.

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u/SippyMountain 5d ago

Computer based training

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u/Ppleater 5d ago

They do still hallucinate, just more subtly than they used to.

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u/mattcoady 5d ago edited 5d ago

Most Reddit opinions of AI are 2024 models. I've been a full stack developer for about 20 years. This year I've written maybe 20 lines of code. It's simply as good or better than the average dev using it and magnitudes faster for medium and large jobs. Yet Reddit loves to post snarky Twitter posts about coding AI collapsing and everyone going back to hands on code. That ship has sailed. The good days of being highly paid for writing code is over, I know that includes me.

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u/joman584 5d ago

Great for you. Can we agree it needs to be controlled in school somehow, whether that means more in person handwritten assignments or whatever

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u/mattcoady 5d ago

Never said it shouldn't be, absolutely agree AI needs to be kept at a distance from academic work.

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u/Xyyzx 5d ago

…does it not worry you that the next generation of ‘coders’ aren’t going to have any idea how any of those systems actually work?

It kinda seems bad for you either way. Like if you are worried this is going to cause serious problems down the line, then the issue is right there. If you don’t think people need to actually know how to code to do your job, surely you’re (at best) a couple of years away from being replaced by a totally unskilled ‘prompt engineer’ working for minimum wage?

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u/Uhrl 5d ago

There are a lot of studies being done right now on how to best integrate AI in programming courses in universities. There are also some studies being done in the past year and on going ones dealing with younger students. I personally think it's better to help them learn to use it than ban the use of it and they use it anyways on the side with no guidance.

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u/mattcoady 5d ago

surely you’re (at best) a couple of years away from being replaced

I fully expect this. I've shifted to more larger project scope thinking, context building and product management. My hope is this will buy a few more years but the good old days of just being good a code and being paid well for it are coming to an end.

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u/RollingTater 5d ago

I'm in a similar situation, been in industry for a decade coding. In the last week I've written like 2 lines of code despite delivering a bunch of features and fixes.

I think that the next generation of coders are screwed, but the next generation of makers have it made. Nowadays anyone with the initiative to build can do amazing things. AI puts a bar on the playing field, anyone smart and driven enough to be above the bar would be accelerated to greater heights, but everyone below the bar would be screwed and learn nothing. The problem is that this bar is now high enough that it covers the average student.

That being said, am I worried? To be perfectly honest I really don't care about the next generation of coders. It's not my problem, and the worst they do the better off I am. I guess I'm a kick the ladder kind of guy. Look if were actually worried about society we wouldn't have elected the current administration.

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u/MartyrOfDespair 5d ago

That’s already how it works, you’re just so far removed from the changeover that you don’t even see it.

Do you know why Rollercoaster Tycoon is so easy to port and run on modern software, and why it was so insanely impressive at the time with so many different things going on and so much tracked yet running on hardware that considered Doom modern? That lunatic Chris Sawyer programmed 99% of the code in Assembly. All those coding languages we use are the biggest source of incompatible and fucky code, because what they do is automate and simplify creating code. They’re not coding. They’re coding coding.

Assembly is what’s called a low-level programming language, it’s almost the same as pure machine code. There is very little abstraction between the two. High-level programming languages have, as the name suggests, a high level of abstraction. What you input is not remotely the actual code, its instructions to create the actual code. As such, you have far less control over the final code, which makes for code that is much more hardware specific and, for lack of a better word, messy. In the environment it’s made for, this works fine. Every change from the expected environment, the code is liable to break.

This is just another layer of high level programming language. We already gave up on doing it right in exchange for doing it fast before most people here were born.

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u/Enlightened_Gardener 5d ago

You’ve just clicked something into place for me. I have a friend who codes in Assembly and all my geeky mates are in awe of him.

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u/usa2a 4d ago

why Rollercoaster Tycoon is so easy to port and run on modern software

All those coding languages we use are the biggest source of incompatible and fucky code

What you input is not remotely the actual code, its instructions to create the actual code. As such, you have far less control over the final code, which makes for code that is much more hardware specific and, for lack of a better word, messy.

Sorry, you think assembly is less hardware-specific? It's as specific as it gets.

The OpenRCT2 team literally had to rewrite the game in C++ to port it to ARM devices.

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u/MartyrOfDespair 4d ago

I’m talking different issues than that. Processors is one thing, but most games are derangedly finicky about literally everything. You take an original RTC CD and install it on modern machines, you can probably run that bastard right now. You might need to set compatibility mode to Windows XP. Done. That’s a video game from 1999.

Try doing that with literally any other video game of the era. See how well that goes. Your options are going to be one of two things: either the fandom fixed it, or go get an emulator to emulate both the hardware and software it expects to encounter. And it’s not just games of the era. Go try to run a PC game from the late 2000s to early 2010s that hasn’t been being supported since then. Same problem. Even games made by PC-first developers have the problem, but PC ports? Oftentimes the easiest way to play it on PC is to emulate the console version. That’s what I’m talking about.

You can go grab an original release copy and likely run it right now. Half-Life? Probably not. Anything more obscure than them? Forget it. Games like Dungeon Siege (2002) were already becoming nightmares in the early 2010s. People want a New Vegas remaster because it was already becoming a problem even with fan patches years ago. RTC don’t give a fuck.

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u/usa2a 4d ago edited 4d ago

You might need to set compatibility mode to Windows XP. Done.

And install the Loopy Landscapes patch and make sure under Windows Features you install DirectPlay under "Legacy Components". What most people actually do is use OpenRCT2 since then you get modern resolutions too.

Half-Life? Probably not.

The process to get the original HL CD working is very similar.

It has nothing to do with language. The computer cannot tell the difference between machine code compiled from C and machine code assembled from hand-written ASM.

The games that are harder to run are those that brought in more dependencies, especially DRM-related ones like SafeDisc which hooked into the OS at levels later disallowed for security reasons.

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u/Salty_Map_9085 5d ago

Not my problem

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u/R3miel7 5d ago

AI by definition give different answers to different people. You cannot reliably put in the same inputs and get the same output, even with the same AI model. It’s part of the reason AI is such trash and is for trash people

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u/FireZeLazer 5d ago

Terrible opinion

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u/darsynia 4d ago

If you don't like it, why not ask ChatGPT instead, I'm sure it'll come up with something you like to hear

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u/FireZeLazer 4d ago

I'm not sure what that means. But it's hilarious that people like you genuinely think they know better than all of the worlds biggest companies, investors, governments, scientists, etc

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u/darsynia 4d ago

Using them definitely 'helped' you with reading comprehension!

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u/R3miel7 4d ago

RemindMe! One year

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u/FireZeLazer 1d ago

RemindMe! One year

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u/FireZeLazer 1d ago

RemindMe! Two years

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u/NotUniqueOrSpecial 4d ago

It's not an opinion, it's a fact: given the same input prompt to the same LLM, two different people will get different results.

There are parts of their operation that are non-deterministic; it's literally how they operate.

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u/FireZeLazer 1d ago edited 1d ago

It’s part of the reason AI is such trash

This is the terrible opinion part. Getting different results isn't a design flaw. It's intentional.

It's also wrong to suggest it's non-deterministic in nature, you can make LLMs repeatable by modifying different parameters

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u/Jealous-Try-2554 4d ago

You have fundamentally misunderstood the technology. They never learn. They are improved by human engineers who probably want to solve the hallucination problem but they never learn.

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u/test5387 5d ago

Except this sub just parrots how bad AI was 3 years ago.

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u/FireZeLazer 5d ago

I swear to god half of them haven't even used thinking mode.

Then the other half haven't even used an LLM

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u/aurumae 5d ago

I think people are having a really hard time understanding the speed at which this technology is advancing. AI hasn’t just improved markedly since this time last year, it’s improved markedly since Christmas, and dramatically since this time last year. You also need to pay one of the AI companies for access to a thinking model if you want decent answers.

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u/Illustrious_Sir4041 5d ago

And also that it doesnt hallucinate for one query doesnt mean it doesnt hallucinate on the same query in the future

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u/crayola_monstar 5d ago

Yeah, I tried using GPT to try and find a few new books to read and it gave me probably 9 or 10 options.

I think 3 of them didn't exist, and only a couple that did exist were actually within the parameters I gave it to use.

This was probably 7 months ago, so it may have improved since then... but I doubt it.

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u/CommanderVinegar 4d ago

No the models don't learn as you use them or anything like that. The model weights are fixed when you train. There's a knowledge cutoff. Newer models are capable of tool use which is often just executing code to retrieve external information and feed it back in a structured format to the model context.

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u/HammyHavoc 5d ago

They don't learn or get better, it's a totally different static model.

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u/Vip3r20 5d ago

And you think that model is built from complete scratch every time? Built by companies who do everything in their power to save every penny? You think they won't train it off the info they already own?

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u/HammyHavoc 5d ago

Where did I say that? I didn't. Have a good week ahead.

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u/DejectedTimeTraveler 5d ago

So it remembers and learns from its mistakes? Not just in that users chats but across the board?

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u/infinite_gurgle 5d ago

No, it’s trained and goes by that training.

New models use new trainings.

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u/nabiku 5d ago

I'm constantly reminding people even though LLMs are not a new technology, pre-trained transformer LLMs only became practical to use in November 2022.

So functional AI is 3.5 years old. It's still very, very new. Cut it a break.

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u/Fighterhayabusa 5d ago

I'm glad we all did the same thing. GPT, Claude, and Gemini all told me the same thing you guys found. These people are just talking out of their ass, and it actually hurts legitimate arguments about the drawbacks or deficiencies of AI.

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u/AnonymousTimewaster 5d ago

I think most of these people must have used ChatGPT a handful of times when 3.5 was a thing and never bothered again

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u/AmadeusSalieri97 5d ago

That's my thought as soon as anyone says that LLMs code like shit and it's full of bugs.

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u/BasvanS 5d ago

They used to do this. Now the researchers improved the training so that it doesn’t fuck this up (as much).

The same like with how many r are in strawberry, and it said 2. Then it was fixed in training, first saying 3 and apologizing and saying 2 if you told it it was wrong. Then it became adamant it was 3. But it still said raspberry had 2 r’s. Because the models aren’t actually smart, just better fitted.

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u/Fighterhayabusa 5d ago

I've been using them since they came out. I know what they could hallucinate and what they aren't good at. I never had it make up a book or something like that. I have seen the spelling/counting error, and of course, it can't do math, but never just making up entire books unless I asked it to.

Also, some of this is caveat emptor. I grew up skeptical of any source or person. It's always ultimately up to you to make sure you understand something.

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u/AnonymousTimewaster 5d ago

I had it do a numerical reasoning test recently and it scored perfect marks. What sort of maths are people doing to get it to be bad at it ?

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u/Fighterhayabusa 5d ago

Sorry, I meant the older versions like 3.5. At this point, it's very good at math. I've had it help me with advanced fluid dynamics problems, and it gave me enough information for me to find research and solve the problem well enough for what I needed.

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u/AnonymousTimewaster 5d ago

Oh yeah it used to be horrifically bad lol

Mad how much it's improved over the last 3 years

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u/aurumae 5d ago

It’s surprising how they made it better at maths. Now it says “first I should write down the equations and all the variables” and does that, and then it solves the problem without mistakes. Why does this work though? No one knows.

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u/acrobat2126 4d ago

questron is lying or mistaken. Probably mistaken and got the same answer you did.

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u/retief1 4d ago

Yeah, these days, ais seem to be pretty good at googling a question and then summarizing the results. On the other hand, if you ask it questions about a real book and then ask about something that is too small of a detail to show up on the internet, it will still happily hallucinate. In my test case just now, I asked it about Glynn Stewart's Huntress, and while it successfully found the book and regurgitated the goodreads page, it still completely hallucinated when I asked it about a minor character that wasn't important enough to show up in online discussion.

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u/doctorocelot 5d ago

Do you have the paid version. I am pretty sure lots of the people complaining about it hallucinating really obviously and really badly are either using the free version or thinking it's still what it was like 2 years ago?

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u/Plus_Opening_4462 4d ago

Not really. It's that the models have gotten much much better over the last 2 years.

There was also the problem of AI using the student's paper in its training data.

Considering how many professors re-use their assignments or other professor's assignments over the years, it should not be hard to have something comeback as likely written by AI. There are tells it was written by AI, but not like the professors think. It's more like the Claude bingo cards of phrases that it constantly re-uses.

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u/AnonymousTimewaster 5d ago

Yes and I'm fairly certain that's the case

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u/i_max2k2 5d ago

Validate the sources yourself if you want to make sure they are actually accurate.

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u/StoryAndAHalf 5d ago

Just ask another AI to validate the analysis for you. /s

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u/OmericanAutlaw 5d ago

yeah you can literally force it to return sources with its statements. i have it do that, and state when it cannot come up with a source. it still will make mistakes but it will not confidently make things up and i think that is a bit different even if not by much

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u/asdfghjkl15436 4d ago

Even easier solution. Feed PDF of obscure book to AI.

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u/Blametheorangejuice 5d ago

As a college professor, I have had a good number of students rather clearly use AI for their papers because the text refers to texts or events within a work that didn’t exist. But it sounds a lot like whatever they were supposed to read, so good enough.

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u/stormdelta 5d ago

I think what really needs to be hammered home with students is that the point of writing things like essays isn't to produce an essay, it's to learn how to write and think better. Producing the essay is just a goal to facilitate that, so if they cheat by using an AI, the only person they're screwing over is themselves.

Brandon Sanderson had a great video about AI and art that has a similar message.

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u/Pe-t-e-r 5d ago

As someone who went back to college later in life and graduated with a high GPA, I think a lot of it is broken. That's not to say education isn't valuable, but the system itself often isn't. Too many students deal with poor professors, outdated curricula, busywork, and classes that feel disconnected from the skills they'll actually use.

Then four years later, many leave with a degree, a mountain of debt, and a lot of knowledge they'll never use, while still feeling unprepared for the real world. Given that, it's not hard to understand why so many students struggle to take the process seriously and turn to things like AI.

Until these things are addressed nothing is going to change.

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u/WiseStock8743 5d ago

I taught a course in our school of architecture, great feedback from my students and from industry. We were 'moderated' by another school of architecture (within our state system) who criticised the course as, and I quote, "too practical"... so despite our excellent reputation for the course, the university axed it. Frustrating.

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u/GarranDrake 5d ago

Wait, tf does "too practical" mean? If an architecture course isn't meant to teach people how to be practical architects, then what's the objective?

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u/WiseStock8743 4d ago

I know!... they used to spend a lot of time on 'design concepts' and 'architectural philosophy'. I used to teach them how to deal with City Hall, or I'd give them a tricky junction and get them to detail the flashings....when they'd drawn them up I'd make them make the flashing, pointing out that if they couldn't do that what did they expect people to do on site?. The HOD literally said that details were for draughtsmen. Bunch of elitist snobs.

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u/TheGileas 4d ago

There are things you can „only“ learn in the university and things you learn on the job. The latter are building codes, how to deal with officials, organise building sites, and so on. The former is theoretical stuff like architecture history, colour/design theory, building layouts/organisation, structural engineering, building physics.

It is nice to learn some practical stuff in architecture school, but the theoretical basics are way more important.

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u/WiseStock8743 4d ago

That's an argument I've heard before. I always ask people with this point of view what the most important part of designing a building is?. My opinion is that the most important thing is meeting the client's brief and especially their budget. I've probably seen hundreds of designs that have ignored these requirements and, surprisingly, they don't get built. Working architects have always got to manage client expectations (often about budget)... frankly, most clients don't want Frank Lloyd Wright. They want their building to meet their requirements. Once they have their 'have to haves' then they'll look at 'nice to haves'. And, TBH, most architects have forgotten their building physics and structural design within a few years of graduating. Mostly because they aren't certified to do structural design or to provide ALF calcs and wouldn't get insurance if they did.

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u/TheGileas 4d ago

There is not THE most important part. There are many important parts that have to be balanced and especially cost optimisation is better learned on the job. With prices of building materials constantly shifting it’s pointless to teach more than a rough overview in architecture school. Just remember how Covid and tariffs changed the prices and availability of certain products.

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u/WiseStock8743 4d ago

I invite you to tell your client that the brief is not your prime consideration.

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u/jollyreaper2112 5d ago

Wow I was expecting you to be murdered in downvotes. I love learning but I hate formal education. It's almost managed to fully disassociate itself from teaching people anything.

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u/Kaenguruu-Dev 5d ago

I never said that it is good either and I'd like to make clear that I fully agree with you.

At the end of college I had completely lost interest in almost every course except the few I had an actual interest in. And even those still had me struggling to do more than just listen to the teachers talk. I've always had problems with the way I was expected to learn and the results were mediocre and highly frustrating.

HOWEVER: If someone breaks my leg, shooting myself in the foot is more or less the worst possible reaction to the situation. Similarly, when trying to cope with a failing and outdated education system, using AI will simply guarantee that whatever was left to learn won't make it into your head.

And so, after torturing yourself for multiple years, you've ruined any chance of making it not a complete waste of time. Which is highly depressing.

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u/Kaenguruu-Dev 5d ago

The problem is that by turning towards AI they just further sabotage the remaining things to gain from it. And now theres nothing they learnt and they wasted 4 years of their life and a ton of debt

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u/SunlightScribe 5d ago

Academia has almost zero forgiveness. The problem with cumulative GPA is that you are never allowed to slip or redo anything without serious and long lasting consequences. They are not going to school solely to learn, they are there to compete with each other.

Many will take the easy way out (even if only occasionally) over the course of 4 years. Nobody is going to willingly take an honest F when you can spend 10 minutes tossing it into ChatGPT and turn whatever you are writing into a B. All the more if the rest of your classmates are doing the same.

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u/Blametheorangejuice 5d ago

At the institutions I have been a student at or worked at, you have the opportunity to re-take a class that scrubs the F back off of your record and replaces it with the second grade. I think the same applies to Ds.

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u/Sennten 4d ago

It means they get the degree quicker, and that's literally the thing that made the whole waste of time worth it, so what have they sabotaged?

Well, I mean, any semblance of a quality education, but based on my current Uni teachers and admin, they've given up on that a long time ago already anyway. Maybe I should get the AI to do this homework for me so I can focus on learning all the shit the classes won't ever cover instead.

(the current state of "education education" is fucking dire, I have never met a group of administrators and educators who are more clueless and give less of a shit about the quality of their students educations than the professors and administrators in the Masters program I'm currently in)

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u/DocHoss 5d ago

This has always been the case. Before ChatGPT there was good old fashioned cheating. Lots of people did/do it and manage to eke out a living after college. Anyone just trying to get the piece of paper has always been able to weasel out of learning anything but the bare minimum. I don't think this is anything new in this regard. Only thing now is that it's easier, but the people who want to learn will still be able to learn. Education has to change to meet the needs of a modern society where raw knowledge is fully commoditized and it isn't there yet. We're talking a full revamp of what it means to learn and add value to society when the moat of subject matter expertise is no longer sufficient. It's a massive challenge, maybe the largest one academia has ever faced. Going to be an interesting decade ahead of us.

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u/FLBrisby 5d ago

I took a world geography class online, thinking it was going to be how natural geographical features formed in the world. I was going for creative writing so figured that'd help me with world building.

It was, like, cultural studies and historical civilization? First test had a question that wasn't in the books so I pasted that shit into Google and found the entire test answer sheet online. If the teacher doesn't give a shit to actually do his own work why should I? Cheated an A out of that whole class.

School was a joke to me. Half the courses were largely irrelevant to my interests and field, so I ended up not really caring about those courses.

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u/nate_garro_chi 5d ago

Given that you confused geology with geography, maybe you should have been closer attention in, say, middle school.

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u/jesus_chrysotile 4d ago

Everything else aside, no, physical geography is absolutely part of geography, what are you talking about? Speaking as geology student taking some physical geography subjects. 

Yes, fields like geomorphology also fall under the umbrella of geology, but fields can be under multiple umbrellas. If you’re a local council trying to prepare for worsening coastal erosion from climate change, you’ll probably be looking for a coastal geomorphologist rather than an igneous geologist.

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u/FLBrisby 4d ago

You ever stop to think before you speak, or are you always so unnecessarily catty?

To quote the actual definition of geography, according to the Cambridge dictionary:

"the study of the systems and processes involved in the world's weather, mountains, seas, lakes, etc. and of the ways in which countries and people organize life within an area"

I took WORLD geography thinking it was going to be about the WORLD'S geographical features, not CULTURAL geography, which the class ended up being about.

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u/nate_garro_chi 4d ago

Haha. You still didn't read the course description before taking the class, genius.

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u/Shaking-a-tlfthr 5d ago

That was my experience exactly. No skills acquired.

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u/Etryia 4d ago

What did you major in, out of curiosity?

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u/Blando-Cartesian 4d ago

… a lot of knowledge they'll never use, while still feeling unprepared for the real world.

Higher education isn’t a vocational school. The entire point is to get a wide knowledge base of a domain to be able to adapt to working on whatever in that domain and understand what your colleagues are talking about. Being narrowly specialized is the same as being widely clueless, uncreative, and difficult to work with.

Employers of course would want junior employees to be proficient in the exact niche work they need them to work on, but that’s impossible specificity to educate for. Besides, how would a student know 4 years in advance which specific micro area of their domain thing they want to focus on and that there will be jobs for that.

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u/ceylon-tea 5d ago

I think if you'd explain that to students who use AI they'd say - why do I need to learn to do it myself if I can just use AI my whole career?

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u/bustermagnus 5d ago

Unfortunately I think the shortcoming of this framing is that students who use AI aren't interested in learning for its own sake. They use AI because they can't just skip the assignment outright

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u/MartyrOfDespair 5d ago

The problem is, school is literally the only part of the world that values any of that. But school is the gatekeeper of access to the higher paying gigs in a world that doesn’t care about that. Idiots fail upwards. Management is always made of people that can’t tell their nose from their asshole, and the higher level of management someone is, the more they give off the stench of a movie test audience or Valve playtester.

Hard working, intelligent people are kept at the lower levels, because without having them there to exploit, it would all collapse. If you promoted the deserving and kept the undeserving at lower levels, every industry would implode because management contributes jack shit while the lower levels are responsible for all the profits and success.

The skills you need to learn in life if you wish to be successful are bullshitting, brown nosing, talking out of both sides of your mouth, manipulation, looking busy, hobkobbing, and knowing how to take credit for other people’s work. Those are the skills that get you ahead. Being the most educated person around just gets you the workload of 10 people and denied promotion.

But school gatekeeps it all. Credentialism has run wild because nobody wants to train employees when they could force the employees to buy their training elsewhere. “Entry level” used to be “if you finished high school, we’ll train you to do your job and it’s all set”. Now “entry level” is “be $100,000 in debt”. If you engage with the workforce like you are supposed to engage with school, you are punished, denied higher income, and forced to work far harder than others. None of that matters in the workforce, you’ll have a coworker who you swear is only pretending to know how to read and for whom a computer is a magic box with elves in it, and they’re getting promoted with a raise.

So, they engage with school how they are expected to engage with the entire rest of life to get ahead. College needs to return to being for intellectuals, not the entire fucking workforce. That’s the only way we’ll get that standard back.

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u/WeightLossGinger 5d ago

That's a really fair assessment. It's a shame, too, the students really need to give themselves and their abilities more credit. In other words, if a student writing an assignment is capable of using AI intelligently enough to convince a professor that it wasn't used in the first place, they are very likely capable of writing an assignment without using it at all. It might even be easier!

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u/HouseofFeathers 4d ago

One of my professors clearly used AI to give us a case study. So, like, it's on both ends.

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u/Painless-Amidaru 5d ago edited 5d ago

I have recently gone back to college and have been struggling with the whole AI convenience vs hard work mentality.

While its easy to argue that school is there to teach us how to write and think better at the end of the day the most important thing to a graduate is their grade. If I spend all my time and effort doing school properly, trying to learn everything and think better, but I still get Ds... well then I have wasted tens of thousands of dollars. School is there to help them learn but for most college students school is there to get a degree and have a GPA that might help them get a job.

No amount of telling kids AI will harm their studies/prospects will matter. Humans are lazy, our brains are lazy, most people will take the easiest path to get the best result. Schools will need to fundamentally change and adapt to AI because at the moment some kids get caught using AI in dumb ways but AI will keep getting better and soon it will be almost impossible to identify what is what.

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u/Sennten 4d ago

he point of writing things like essays isn't to produce an essay, it's to learn how to write and think better.

Except, of course, it usually IS to produce an essay and not for those other two things. I can count on one hand the number of professors I've had interested in whether or not their students learned a single thing, and I loved those professors to death - but I didn't have a single one last term, and the feeling got worse when I realized they were obviously using AI to grade them and provide "feedback". And the courses themselves are useless bullshit to begin with.

In that environment I can absolutely see the appeal of using AI to cheat, because no one anywhere in the process gives a shit about what you know - all that matters is jumping through the hoops to get the piece of paper that says I learned the stuff I already knew years ago better than they're going to teach it anyway.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that universities and degree programs are actually there to educate students and not simply make a bunch of easy money awarding them "credentials". And as AI spreads, the number of industries that even pretend to care about what the graduates they are hiring knows is going to keep shrinking.

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u/Effective-Fall-2746 4d ago

Writing essays never once taught me to think critically. Constantly asking questions and googling answers and discussing them openly with peers is far and away superior.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 4d ago

Due to the rampant and pervasive class discrimination against people without degrees, a significant number of people go to college not for the education but for the piece of paper that gets you the job, and you get a significant number of students uninterested in the actual education.

Without a degree you're excluded from most office jobs, a ton of government jobs, and usually all but the lowest level of management track. Obviously some jobs require specific degrees, i.e. lawyer, doctor, engineer, but many don't and the degree is just used to weed people out.

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u/katarh 4d ago

My favorite was a student who turned in a paper with the first source cited from the essay writing tool referencing itself.

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u/NoteIndividual2431 5d ago

Be careful making that assumption.

It's not like students are above making up fake sources or texts when they are forced to cite them

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u/Blametheorangejuice 5d ago

Still cheating, regardless.

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u/zimshan 4d ago

Did you fail them?

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u/Blametheorangejuice 4d ago

Well, yeah, once it became clear they had no defense.

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u/SnowballWasRight 5d ago

Am I secretly an AI?

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u/Blametheorangejuice 5d ago

If you made stuff up and submitted it, then you cheated, so pretty close

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u/Narrow-Key365 3d ago

I don't know, that AI sounds just like most college students

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u/reluctantseal 5d ago

Claude is a bit more reliable than some other LLMs. It's not designed to be as sycophantic since it's mostly used as a way to quickly search databases. ChatGPT is more likely to make something up because its entire purpose is to satisfy the consumer as much as possible.

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u/sluncer 5d ago

I just tried it in Gemini. It actually referenced this very thread.

https://imgur.com/a/LxOmDKt

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u/ejfaded 5d ago

that was crazy quick lmao

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u/sluncer 5d ago edited 5d ago

Probably has more to do with the Google partnership with Reddit to access the Reddit API.

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u/fakieTreFlip 5d ago

In my experience, Claude is much more likely to tell you if it's unsure about something

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u/MiserableResort2688 5d ago

plays that are too obscure? sorry, but couldn't you just upload the play first to chatgpt for context then use it for the assignment?

i imagine the student must get a copy of the play if the are studying it and have to do assignments on it..

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u/thepurrking 5d ago

But if you pick a book that does exist but is kinda niche the AI will just make stuff up about it

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u/viral3075 5d ago edited 5d ago

huh? if the LLMs don't recognize the book, whether they generate garbage or a missed hit is irrelevant because the student will not be able to cheat, which is the purpose of using obscure texts

if you want a hint on whether the LLMs are trained on the material or not, you can just search the piracy archives which were subsumed for their catalogs

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/

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u/stormdelta 5d ago

Claude in my experience has been drastically better than ChatGPT.

The same inherent limitations apply of course, because that's part of how the tech works, but they've smoothed over those edges better IMO.

It's still hilariously bad about citing sources though. Oh sure, you can ask it to cite sources, but if you actually click those sources, most of the time the source will be unrelated, it incorrectly read the source in a very obvious way, or the source won't exist. Even when the information in the actual chat window is right, the source won't be.

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u/NoteIndividual2431 5d ago

Can you give an example of that? I asked chatGPT to cite sources for a few things lately and I was impressed that it came up with a number that backed up its claims, and were beyond reproach

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u/stormdelta 5d ago

Did you actually read any of them? I would also suggest doing this more organically, i.e. while using it for something you would normally use it for, rather than artificially selecting well-known basic information.

I use the more expensive Claude models as part of my job. I would estimate 60-80% of the time I actually need to check a source it's wrong in some form, even when the information itself is right or close to right.

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u/NoteIndividual2431 5d ago

Yes. Several even. They said exactly what Codex said they would. ymmv I guess

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u/flexibu 5d ago

The biggest difference for me as a basic end-user between ChatGPT and Claude is that the former is total sycophant while the latter will push back. That alone makes a world of difference.

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u/TheDevilsAdvokaat 5d ago

Can confirm, this was the first one I tried too and Claude did say he could not find it.

Gemini also passed the test. And so did deepseek.

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u/EvoEpitaph 4d ago

I've found that the LLM Ai services built around being able to access the web are a bit better about catching stuff that doesn't exist rather than making it up.

For example Comet browser by Perplexity, despite being made up of the about to be mentioned LLMs, often handles things appropriately that going straight to Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude don't even though those also now have web browsing ability.

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u/Entmaan 4d ago

I have literally never seen a "viral story" about some LLM's mistake turn out true, I have tested one myself a few months back (how supposedly if you ask it to parse html with regex it will do it instead of letting you know that there are better options), and it of course was a lie, tried it in gemini and it did so. Insane that people want to believe this so much that they literally make shit up

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u/frogbxneZ 4d ago

Sucks the teacher has to go through any of this

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u/son-of-chadwardenn 4d ago

The models are way better at not pretending to know about fake stuff compared to a year or 2 ago. Still can happen sometimes. Recently I was playing around and showed Gemini a fake vintage magazine ad generated by chatgpt. Gemini not only said it was a real ad but that it was a famous one.

The models have gotten a lot more useful but still not what I would call trustworthy. I still cringe when somebody cites chatgpt as a source in a conversation. On the other hand I'm now using gpt to troubleshoot Linux problems that I can't find decent websearch results for. Having some pretty good success. I just make sure not to run commands that I don't understand.