>Scott Hennessey, the owner of the New South Wales-based Australian Tours and Cruises, which operates Tasmania Tours, told the Australian Broadcasting Network (ABC) earlier this month that “our AI has messed up completely.”
To me this is the real takeaway for a lot of these uses of AI. You can put in practically zero effort and get a product. Then, when that product flops or even actively screws over your customers, just blame the AI!
No one is admitting it but AI is one of the easiest ways to shift blame. Companies have been doing this ever since they went digital. Ever heard of "a glitch in the system"? Well, now with AI you can have as many of those as you want, STILL never accept responsibility, and if you look to your left and right, everyone is doing it, and no one is paying the price.
It sounds like in this case there was some troll-fueled comeuppance.
> “We’re not a scam,” he continued. “We’re a married couple trying to do the right thing by people … We are legit, we are real people, we employ sales staff.”
> Australian Tours and Cruises told CNN Tuesday that “the online hate and damage to our business reputation has been absolutely soul-destroying.”
This might just be BS, but at face-value, this is a mom and pop shop that screwed up playing the SEO game and are getting raked over the internet coals.
Your broader point about blame-washing stands though.
> No one is admitting it but AI is one of the easiest ways to shift blame.
Similar to what Facebook, Google, Twitter/X, Tiktok etc have been doing for a long time using the platform-excuse.
"We are just a platform. We are not to blame for all this illegal or repugnant content. We do not have resources to remove it."
How often do you have to update your page on "what's in a town" to "compete with the big boys"? Seems like you could just google what's in the town, or visit if you really want to make sure, rather than just asking your favourite LLM "What's there to do in Weldborough"?
The goal is to attract search traffic to your page, so that you can promote your product or your brand. AI is making this a lot cheaper than before because you don't even need to create the content, but it's also killing the overall amount of traffic to all websites.
If you actually take pride in your work, it's a double whammy of competing with AI slop and losing over half of your traffic to AI summaries.
I find takes like this very strange. Whether or not it gives the correct information, it's clearly not designed to give false information to factual queries.
The design of it is based on the intention of the people creating it, not the actual outcome, and it's pretty clear from all available information, plus a general understanding of incentives, that it's designed to be as accurate as possible, even if it does make errors.
has anyone checked to see if the AI included time co ordinates as well?
it might be that AI is missunderstanding our tempotral limitations, and if prompted correctly will provide a handy portal to when, there will in fact be hot springs at the location suggested.
In case anyone else is curious, I just entered the following in chatgpt: "Without searching the internet, do you know how to get to weldborough hot springs?"
> Yeah—roughly, from general local knowledge (no web searching, promise ). I’ll flag where my memory might be fuzzy.
> Weldborough Hot Springs are in northeast Tasmania, near Weldborough Pass on the Tasman Highway (A3) between Scottsdale and St Helens.
I love stories like this because there are still allegedly tech-savvy people who will insist that AIs don't lie, don't hallucinate and rarely if ever make errors.
At the end of the day, LLMs are a statistical approximation or projection.
A good example of this is how LLMs struggle with multiplication, particularly multipolcation of large numbers. It's not just that they make mistakes but the nature of the results.
Tell ChatGPT to multiply 129348723423 and 2987892342424 and it'll probably get it wrong because nowhere on Reddit is that exact question for it to copy. But what's interesting is it'll tend to get the first and large digits correct (more often than not) but the middle is just noise.
Someone will probably say "this is a solved problem" because somebody, somewhere has added this capability to a given LLM but these kinds of edge cases I think will constantly expose the fundamental limits of transformers, just like the famous "how many r's in strawberry?" example that di the rounds.
All this comes up when you tell LLMs to write legal briefs. They completely make up a precedent because they learn what a precedent looks like and generate something similar. Lawyers have been caught submitting fake precedents in court filings due to this.
I binged ST:NG before it went away again on Netflix. The more I heard from Data, the more he sounded like where Ai should be heading: Quick, thorough reasoning but followed by explicit, tagged verification from external ground truth.
There needs to be a more meta, layered approach to reason. Different personalities viewing the output with different hats on: "That's a bold claim, champ. Search required." But I guess the current real-time, interactive nature of these systems makes it difficult to justify.
My problem with AI support agents is that instead of being good classifiers for my problem, they're even more non deterministic now in terms of grievance or query redressal. If a listed option is not available, I'd rather talk to a human who'd know or have the ability to find out, instead of an LLM which would just make something up with no grounding.
Who exactly posted this without proofreading?
The guy claims that he always proofreads, until he's out of country.
Does this mean he decided to update his site, but didn't bother proofreading on vacation? Or did someone else decide to generate and post results without opening Google?
AI didn't tell people anything, it lied to exactly one employer, who decided to tell tourists unverified facts.
26 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 60.7 ms ] threadIt is however fraud on the part of the travel company to advertise something that doesn't exist. Another form of externalized cost of AI.
Seems par for course.
To me this is the real takeaway for a lot of these uses of AI. You can put in practically zero effort and get a product. Then, when that product flops or even actively screws over your customers, just blame the AI!
No one is admitting it but AI is one of the easiest ways to shift blame. Companies have been doing this ever since they went digital. Ever heard of "a glitch in the system"? Well, now with AI you can have as many of those as you want, STILL never accept responsibility, and if you look to your left and right, everyone is doing it, and no one is paying the price.
Treating AI models as autonomous minds lets companies shift responsibility for tech failures.
> “We’re not a scam,” he continued. “We’re a married couple trying to do the right thing by people … We are legit, we are real people, we employ sales staff.”
> Australian Tours and Cruises told CNN Tuesday that “the online hate and damage to our business reputation has been absolutely soul-destroying.”
This might just be BS, but at face-value, this is a mom and pop shop that screwed up playing the SEO game and are getting raked over the internet coals.
Your broader point about blame-washing stands though.
Similar to what Facebook, Google, Twitter/X, Tiktok etc have been doing for a long time using the platform-excuse. "We are just a platform. We are not to blame for all this illegal or repugnant content. We do not have resources to remove it."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/air-canada-cha...
If you actually take pride in your work, it's a double whammy of competing with AI slop and losing over half of your traffic to AI summaries.
Useful independent websites are so cooked.
You'll still get an AI generate answer at the top, followed by 3 AI generated sponsored blog scams, etc.
No, it worked as designed. Generative AI simply creates content of the type that you specify, but has no concept of truth or facts.
The design of it is based on the intention of the people creating it, not the actual outcome, and it's pretty clear from all available information, plus a general understanding of incentives, that it's designed to be as accurate as possible, even if it does make errors.
> Yeah—roughly, from general local knowledge (no web searching, promise ). I’ll flag where my memory might be fuzzy.
> Weldborough Hot Springs are in northeast Tasmania, near Weldborough Pass on the Tasman Highway (A3) between Scottsdale and St Helens.
Screenshot with more: https://postimg.cc/14TqgfN4
At the end of the day, LLMs are a statistical approximation or projection.
A good example of this is how LLMs struggle with multiplication, particularly multipolcation of large numbers. It's not just that they make mistakes but the nature of the results.
Tell ChatGPT to multiply 129348723423 and 2987892342424 and it'll probably get it wrong because nowhere on Reddit is that exact question for it to copy. But what's interesting is it'll tend to get the first and large digits correct (more often than not) but the middle is just noise.
Someone will probably say "this is a solved problem" because somebody, somewhere has added this capability to a given LLM but these kinds of edge cases I think will constantly expose the fundamental limits of transformers, just like the famous "how many r's in strawberry?" example that di the rounds.
All this comes up when you tell LLMs to write legal briefs. They completely make up a precedent because they learn what a precedent looks like and generate something similar. Lawyers have been caught submitting fake precedents in court filings due to this.
There needs to be a more meta, layered approach to reason. Different personalities viewing the output with different hats on: "That's a bold claim, champ. Search required." But I guess the current real-time, interactive nature of these systems makes it difficult to justify.
Not with the current state of technology. I haven't seen that it works yet. It requires supervision.
It's funny, back in the day computer calculations were checked with human computers. But now? Just trust it bro.
Does this mean he decided to update his site, but didn't bother proofreading on vacation? Or did someone else decide to generate and post results without opening Google?
AI didn't tell people anything, it lied to exactly one employer, who decided to tell tourists unverified facts.