this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 14 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Waste of energy. It's like asking a person to estimate a non-trivial angle. Either use a model trained for that task, or don't bother.

[–] Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 hour ago

The point is they are advertising that these models can do it.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 26 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

It’s the same photo, the same model, the same question. But you won’t get the same answer. Not even close — and the differences are large enough to cause a hypoglycaemic emergency.

OK I wonder if there's something wrong with the photo.
The photo:

WTF!!??
That's like estimating the carbs in 2 slices of standard sandwich bread! Of course not all bread has the same amount of sugar, but a reasonable range based on an average should be a dead easy answer.

I thought the headline sounded crazy, but try to read the article, and it actually becomes worse. I have said it many times before, these AI chatbots should not be legal, they put lives at risk.

[–] inari@piefed.zip 14 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

To be fair there's no way of knowing what the filling is, so the AI may be guessing based on that too

[–] Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 9 points 52 minutes ago

Friendly reminder that LLMs don't do math, they guess what number should come next, just like words.

It can probably link the image to the words "a photo of a sandwich on a plate", and interpret the question as "how many calories are in a sandwich" but from there it is just guessing at the syntax of an answer, but not at finding any truth.

It knows sandwiches have calories and those tend to be 3-4 digit numbers, but also all numbers kinda look the same, so what's to say it's not 2, 5, or 12 digits?

[–] Carnelian@lemmy.world 21 points 2 hours ago

The apps are advertising that they can do this tho. Many of them are aggressively sponsoring YouTubers who advertise you can basically just wave your phone over the food and it takes away all the “work” from traditional calorie counting apps

[–] PatrickYaa@feddit.org 14 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

But the ai assumes itself infallible, at least it could ask...

[–] inari@piefed.zip 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

That's true, it should ask follow-up questions, or at least clarify its assumptions

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip -3 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

They put lives at risk the same way every single product at your local home improvement store does. When you misuse a tool for a purpose it wasn't intended and isn't good at, you're going to get bad results.

This is an issue for the educational system, not the legal system.

[–] Steve@startrek.website 16 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

What if the packaging on every tool at home depot grossly misrepresented its capabilities and/or purpose?

This chainsaw cures cancer? Hot damn somebody call RFK!

Concrete mix goes great with pancakes, etc.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip -2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Does OpenAI claim ChatGPT is fit for those purposes? No.

The concrete itself will happily mix into your pancakes.

[–] Steve@startrek.website 11 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I think the whole point of this discussion is that the various peddlers of AI in fact do make wild claims about their capability.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 hour ago

My observation is that largely it's the downstream AI consumers who repackage it irresponsibly. That said, I don't hang on the words of Sam Altman and it's certain they are pushing the idea that AI is more capable than it is, but mostly what I see is them saying they built this thing and it does neat stuff and it can probably do neat stuff for you, use your imagination.

I believe a lot of the folks developing these tools would be horrified at the irresponsible ways vendors and end users are using it.

[–] HuudaHarkiten@piefed.social 11 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

As others have pointed out, this is also a problem with how they are advertising it.

If duct tape was advertised as something that you can use to hold your roof beams together, you'd have a issue with that.

[–] dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 3 points 44 minutes ago

And at the same time I wouldn't say "hey fuck that, duct tape is terrible! It doesn't hold beams together, I can't use it to tow a trailer, it's all just pretending to stick paper together because really every sliver of duct tape just sticks to the previous piece, etc etc" But that's the cool thing we do on Lemmy.

The ad is bad, duct tape ain't bad.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

I have not seen OpenAI advertise ChatGPT as capable of medical diagnosis or therapy or anything like that. If you want therapy, and you can't afford better — because I think we can agree that AI is terrible at it, then there should be a therapy app with explicit safety controls.

The problem is someone created a screwdriver which is handy for lots of screwdriver shaped purposes and someone is trying to carve a ham.

[–] psycho_driver@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Bruh a couple of months ago I asked it (Gemini) to check the number of characters, including spaces, in a potential game character name because I was working at the time and couldn't stop to check my in-head count. It told me 21--I had counted 20. I thought I must have gotten distracted and miscounted. Later when I had time to actually focus on the issue it turned out AI had miscounted a 20 character string (maybe counting the null terminating character?).

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 15 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

AI doesn't see individual characters, it sees tokens, with most tokens being a word or part of a word. That's why per-character questions have such a high failure rate.

[–] MightEnlightenYou@lemmy.world -1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (2 children)

People should read the top comments on Hackernews instead of anyone here, they're more informed on the topic than Lemmy is

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 43 minutes ago

HN is full of techno fascists

[–] Oisteink@lemmy.world 7 points 2 hours ago

Yeah - if you’re after AI fanbois you should head over there. They’re not that bright, but if you check show and tell you can see what claude’s been ut to last two days