The fact that any AI company thought to train their LLM on the answers of Reddit users speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of their own product (IMO)
LLMs aren’t programmed to give you the correct answer. They’re programmed to give you the most pervasive/popular answer on the assumption that most of the time that will also happen to be the right one.
So when you’re getting your knowledge base from random jackasses on Reddit, where a good faith question like “What’s the best way to get get gum out of my childs hair” get’s two two good faith answers, and then a few dozen smart-ass answers that gets lots of replies and upvotes because they’re funny. Guess which one your LLM is going to use.
People (and apparently even the creators themselves) think that an LLM is actually cognizent enough to be able to weed this out logically. But it can’t. It’s not an intelligence…it’s a knowlege agreggator. And as with any aggregator, the same rule applies
garbage in, garbage out
The main thing that AI has shown, is how much bullshit we subconsciously filter through every day without much effort. (Although clearly some people struggle a lot more with distinguishing between bullshit and fact, considering how much politicized nonsense has taken hold.)
Exactly that.
If I were to google how to get gum out of my child’s hair and then be directed to that same reddit post. I’d read through it and be pretty sure which were jokes and which were serious; we make such distinctions, as you say, every day without much effort.
LLMs simply don’t have that ability. And the number of average people who just don’t get that is mind-boggling to me.
I also find it weirdly dystopian that, if you sum that up, it kind of makes it sound like in order for an LLM to make the next step towards A.I. It needs a sense of humour. It needs the ability to weed through when the information it’s digging from is serious, or just random jack-asses on the internet.
Which is turning it into a very very Star Trek problem.
What it needs most of all, is a fairly complete intuitive model of how the world works. LLMs only have book knowledge. They have no body, perception or experience. I think that’s incredibly limiting.
“How do I parallel park a car?”
AI Overview: “git gud”
Technically correct
Thats why I have stopped calling it ai. Its a dumbass buzzword just like cloud, that tech bros like to use but cant explain (or blockchain).
Its llms, and image generators/OCR (which has been around for decades), Using complex markov chains and a fuck ton of graphics cards. NOT AI. NOT AI.
It is AI, along with a bunch of optimization algorithms, statistical decision trees (probably used in adaptive AI in games), etc. AI is a field in computer science that includes a ton of things many wouldn’t consider AI.
Basically, if the solution doesn’t come from direct commands but instead comes from some form of learning process, it’s probably AI.
It’s not “general AI”, but it is in the field of AI.
I would argue we need to go back to Machine Learning.
The field is machine learning, generative machine learning etc.
This rebrand to AI is doing nothing but confusing people and building investor hype
Back? Machine Learning has always been a subfield of artificial intelligence since it all started in the 1950s or so. The end goal is to create general AI, and each field in AI is considered a piece of that puzzle, including LLMs.
Also fair.
I find the term machine learning more honest than artificial intelligence
It’s more specific, sure, but there’s nothing dishonest about using the same terminology that has been used for almost 100 years.
The disconnect is that average people have a different understanding of the term than is used in computer science, probably because of sci-fi films and whatnot. When I hear “AI,” I think of the CS term, because that’s my background, but when my family hears “AI,” they think of androids and whatnot like in Bicentennial Man.
I don’t know how to square that circle. Neither group here is wrong, but classifying something like ChatGPT as “AI,” while correct, is misinterpreted by the public, who assume it’s doing more than it is.
I use the term “inference machine”
I’ve had to start calling it AI because most people don’t know what LLMs are, and noone cares to go through the explanation, including myself.
I’m afraid that, as these things go, AI has gained a new meaning by popular use, rather than the original meaning of the acronym.
No point fighting it anymore.Maybe we just need to adjust and start saying GAI (generative ai). It has a nice ring to it too.
It’s always been like that, even since the 1950s…
If people are so dumb they dont even know what an llm is, they have no business using any “ai” products. Too bad we cant ban dumb people from using tech that will make them dumber.
Usually the third/fifth comment down is correct while the top 4 are jokes
I don’t care about their stock value but the situation fells so weird. So chatgpt refers to reddit less, and that makes reddit stock value fall. This really shows how much of the share value is pure hype and how much of “the economy” is pure manupulation of numbers instead of actual value.
How decoupled stocks are from reality or value. It’s bizarre.
Tesla is “larger” than all other car companies combined when they’re virtually always “delayed” on actually shipping product. We live in bizarro world. Your livelihood is a single cell in a giant spreadsheet full of completely made-up numbers.
Tesla sells itself as a technology innovation company, but it sells hype.
The thing that baffles me on that one is that it doesn’t stand up on its own terms. None of Tesla’s tech in 2025 is ahead of its competitors, and they’ve become so toxic as a brand that most top tier engineers don’t even want to work there.
The market can stay fascist longer then you can stay solvent.
meme stocks.
That’s actually quite easy to explain. Reddits entire monetary value (or at least a very large portion) depends on how relevant it is as platform to mine user interactions - to use as training material for AI.
Reddit getting references less is a sign that the models, or the owning companies, value reddit data less compared to before.
You just described most tech stocks.
As Cory Doctrow explains:
the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will continue to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of “mature” companies.
Good. Fuck u/Spez.
Keep in mind if the Reddit stock price fell too much some hedge fund vulture would buy up a majority of the stock and then turn it into Nazi town.
Even better then. That’s how the mass migration from twitter happened.
Isn’t it already basically Nazi town?
It is more disaffected people than nazis. At least the places I was at there. The site wide moderation is pretty fucked in favor of powerful interests, including Nazis however. They like to chase off real people that are driving engagement in favor of the legions of influence agents with their bot accounts.
Huh.
Does anyone else think that ChatGPT is still using the data, they’re just not referencing Reddit directly?
This is how you can tell Reddit’s $200+/share price is insane. Over 10% of its value dropped based on a different unprofitable company’s references to ingested content.
Yikes!!
Reddit’s value is its ability to use bots to manipulate and distribute information. It’s just like Twitter, meta and all the other social media platforms.
No, it’s value is that users have up voted and down voted good and bad data. This gives the AI training data that has been crowd sourced by humans. Bots manipulating votes would destroy the value of Reddit.
Bots have been controlling votes on Reddit for years. It costs about $50 to get to the front page of Reddit.
Which is also generally very detectable (if you actually care) and is generally used to push (monetized) social media and not the answer to “what is the difference between normal and merino wool?” and so forth.
The vast majority of the “user” interaction and memes is not the product (at play. it IS useful for societal manipulation but there are better platforms for that). It is all those useful questions and answers that people get pissy about folk deleting the answers to.
Because people, generally, weren’t searching for
team edward or jacob redditbut insteadthe fuck is a renesme redditorLED versus fluourescent bulbs redditand so forth. And the community labeling of the latter is generally REALLY good.Things DO get messy when the question becomes
best synthetic boxer briefs redditbut… it is incredibly rare for an astro turfing campaign to be strong enough to get a genuinely bad product “on top”. You tend to just get an overly expensive branded white label in the top slot which may actually be identical to the “real” best one anyway. But considering you are relying on human opinion regardless, that isn’t far off of what you were gonna get without said astroturfing.Interesting analysis thanks
Ok, so how does a shareholder benefit from that? My company that pays people to stomp on kittens at my kitten stomping factory has value in that in gives people jobs and controls the feral cat population, but it creates no profit for the shareholders.
Reddit shareholders also own a lot of shares in much more lucrative industries.
I didn’t ask about their other shares. I asked how Reddit’s soft power is able to actually benefit shareholders. I understand how it benefits Spez and those who make the actual decisions at reddit, but if I own 400 shares of Reddit, how do i actually benefit since Reddit will never pay a dividend since it will never actually be profitable
The people in power don’t care about people with a few shares. You can sell all your shares right now and nobody would notice.
Reddit’s power benefits whomever wants to push an agenda and a narrative while minimizing any info that could counter that.
Reddit banned me today for making a joke that the patch title for Guild Wars 2 could match real life events.
What is the patch name? The Mad King and his Lunatic Court.
Permanently banned for what? Harassment.
Not how I expected GW2 to come up on Lemmy… But here we are hahaha
I wish I could say I’m shocked. That site has fallen off so hard it’s crazy. The censorship has gone mad. It’s the main reason I’m here.
Hopefully the mods on lemmy don’t go power hungry
Wouldn’t really matter in a federated network like this. Mods banned you from a community? Make a new one. Account banned? Move to another instance.
There’s zero reason to feel attached to online accounts like these, which is the only thing you can lose on Lemmy.
A few have. But when it happens people just start frequenting alternative communities. The good karma flows like water through the easiest path. So when an admin or a mod says they find the term bro offensive, people just unsub and find a better community.
Bro thats so nice
Reddit be a mess, yall
Wasted 15 years on that site to be banned for one fucking comment, burn baby burn.
Same. My comment was “fuck trump and Obama” arguing about using drones to order civilians abroad. Do you remember what your violent advocation was?
Mine was telling someone it was unlikely that spain would declare war on israel, it being a nuclear nation…
Banned for ‘glorifying violence.’
Mine was a direct, attributed quote from the US president.
no OP.
I got the F out and deleted my old posts every time they restored them until they stayed gone.
Deleting your posts was a waste of time. Chances are likely that it is archived on their end.
Reddit has been paying close attention to behavior patterns of banned users and users they wouldn’t want on their platform. It’s likely they’ve gotten your posting imprint and just give you the comfort of thinking you’ve deleted your posts.
deleting your account also wont stop them from finding your new accounts, they mostly archived that as well. they look at browser fingerprinting, device, device components, time zone discrepancy, browser size and VERSION, resolution,etc. if you use any paid service/trial service that can spoof any of these above and they arnt the correct versions, they can detect that.
and then theres the warming up period with new accounts(like not posting, reporting, or upvoting too fast after account creation)
As far as I know, they use things called Evercookies and it’s been a thing now too. If you have an Evercookie, then it won’t really matter what browser you use or even if you clean the cache and history. You have to deep scrub your system and practically all traces of your browser to even get rid of those.
And even so, basic networking is a no brainer when they can just flag your IP and it won’t even matter how many times you’ve done that process.
VPN and Incognito browsing is the way.
I discovered the other night that I couldn’t even browse Reddit anonymously with my VPN active.
They’ve been blocking Vons for years.
The absolute degradation of the site is appalling. And most of the comments read like they’re written by children, because I’m assuming most of them are.
The absolute stupidity of everything on the site is flabberghasting.
I don’t know then. I can browse Reddit just fine and I’m not using a VPN. It is interacting with the content and commenting I can’t do because auto-shadowban.
I suggested drawing in chalk on the street outside of the governor’s mansion, to protest the GIANT chalk Christ she had commissioned across the driveway to celebrate Easter one year.
It wasn’t even a serious call to action.
Mine was “the german train system organisation should be burned down and redone anew” and “sprich deutsch du hurensohn”
Was it your plan to hit em with the left right politics punch, or…?
No it was under a postof news that the CEO again got raised while the trains were delaid heavier than ever and that a lot of bureaucracy holds it back. Its not politics. Litterly just we need to redo how to organise our trains!
Well, everything is politics. But I was more wondering about the “sprich deutsch” Part - that’s usually more of a racist thing, and therefore right wing politics. But if you don’t see public transport as political you might be right-wing overall?
It’s a meme on German language subreddits when Americans shit up the place in English.
Yeah, I got that context now, which I also accounted for with the “usually” qualifier. I still think it builds an attitude that is toxic to outsiders and can potentially push someone into a right-wing position. I have witnessed first hand how someone fell down a fascist rabbit hole via online places touting language superiority.
…are we now just connecting things to put everyone in right corner? God i hate online people…
Guess being against corperates, for self reliance, public owner ship, pro a european state and untouchable democracy, and so on, is now “right wing”.
“Sprich deutsch” in litterly ich_iel is litterly the norm! Thats the joke! Everything is worded german. Guess such is now “right wing”.
“Everything is politics” omfg. Yeah nah. Thats enought Internet for this month, and it only started. Crazy!
bro just skipped the “usually” part and made a rant against things being judged politically.
I think the “everything has to be written in German” part of ich_iel is also establishing a rather nationalist online culture through linguistic homogeny and illegibility to outsiders. So, yeah, you may not want to recognize the impact your words may have, but it’s clear to many others.
i think people were shocked that all thier accounts were banned simulataneously, despite some of them not participating in the same subs, around the same time. they just went after every account in your ip address,device or browser. even if time has passed that a subreddit ban has been lifted in your old accounts. the site filters/AI doesnt take that into account, and i suspect its intentional.
i noticed reddit is very wary of browser forks now too(google, firefox forks), theres a reason they dont like brave(because it hides your fingerprints by default)
I said that folks would blame the Kirk shooting on trans people. What do you know, I was banned and it actually fucking happened.
That’s probably why they are banning people left and right to control the content they want to put out.
Reddit is a parasite that produces nothing of value. The users are the ones keeping the site alive.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer company
Fuck reddit.
News about short term falls are just click bait. Just look at Tesla
Tesla stock ups and downs seem like someone is literally gaming the system.
That’s because he is.
the fact that neither Musk nor none of his cronies ever get comeuppance for that tells you everything you need to know about the “fairness” of the “system”.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
Good. Nazi sympathizing shithole deserves nothing but the worst. Fuck spez and every complicit modgoloid and SSAdmin.
Modgoloid is great.
That’s what pandering to the bigger techbros spez gets.
Being there stopped being fun ever since the shits started running a massive profile-and-purge program powered by fucking AI, as even casually mentioning violence against right-wingers or POTUS and his merry chucklefucks gets your account flagged for banning. That’s why there’s now a chilling effect.
Yeah, and it aged hard like milk.
All my accounts were banned except one, because I used a different email address for that one. Their “AI” isn’t as advanced as they want you to think. They literally just track you by email and IP.
