Or the reader will put you into a category yourself and won't be willing to look at the essence of the argument.

I'd say the better word for that is polarising than political, but they synonims these days.

> build your understanding by evaluating a plurality of sources and perspectives and get to the answer in a statistical manner

A few thousand years of pre-LLM primary sources remain available for evaluation by humans and LLMs.

There are uninhabited islands on the list.

There are people who asked several AI engines (ChatGPT, Grok etc.) “what should the tariff policy be to bring the trade balance to zero?” (quoting from memory) an the answer was the formula used by the Trump administration. If I find the references I will post them as a follow-up.

Russia, North Korea and handful of other countries were spared, likely because they sided with the US and Russia at the UN General Assembly on Feb 24 of this year, in voting against “Advancing a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine.” https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4076672

EDIT: Found it: https://nitter.net/krishnanrohit/status/1907587352157106292

Also discussed here: https://www.latintimes.com/trump-accused-using-chatgpt-creat...

The theory was first floated by Destiny, a popular political commentator. He accused the administration of using ChatGPT to calculate the tariffs the U.S. is charged by other countries, "which is why the tariffs make absolutely no fucking sense."

"They're simply dividing the trade deficit we have with a country with our imports from that country, or using 10%, whichever is greater," Destiny, who goes by @TheOmniLiberal on X, shared in a post on Wednesday.

> I think they asked ChatGPT to calculate the tariffs from other countries, which is why the tariffs make absolutely no fucking sense.

> They're simply dividing the trade deficit we have with a country with our imports from that country, or using 10%, whichever is greater. https://t.co/Rc45V7qxHl pic.twitter.com/SUu2syKbHS

> — Destiny | Steven Bonnell II (@TheOmniLiberal) April 2, 2025

He attached a screenshot of his exchange with the AI bot. He started by asking ChatGPT, "What would be an easy way to calculate the tariffs that should be imposed on other countries so that the US is on even-playing fields when it comes to trade deficit? Set minimum at 10%."

"To calculate tariffs that help level the playing field in terms of trade deficits (with a minimum tariff of 10%), you can use a proportional tariff formula based on the trade deficit with each country. The idea is to impose higher tariffs on countries with which the U.S. has larger trade deficits, thus incentivizing more balanced trade," the bot responded, along with a formula to use.

John Aravosis, an influencer with a background in law and journalism, shared a TikTok video that then outlined how each tariff was calculated; by essentially taking the U.S. trade deficit with the country divided by the total imports from that country to the U.S.

"Guys, they're setting U.S. trade policy based on a bad ChatGPT question that got it totally wrong. That's how we're doing trade war with the world," Aravosis proclaimed before adding the stock market is "totally crashing."

My personal pet-peeve is how a great majority of people--and too many developers--are being misled into believing a fictional character coincidentally named "Assistant" inside a story-document half-created by an LLM is the author-LLM.

If a human generates a story containing Count Dracula, that doesn't mean vampires are real, or that capabilities like "turning into a cloud of bats" are real, or that the algorithm "thirsts for the blood of the innocent."

The same holds when the story comes from an algorithm, and it continues to hold when story is about a differently-named character named "AI Assistant" who is "helpful".

Getting people to fall for this illusion is great news for the companies though, because they can get investor-dollars and make sales with the promise of "our system is intelligent", which is true in the same sense as "our system converts blood into immortality."

That's the real danger of AI.

The false promises of the AI companies and the false expectations of the management and users.

Had it just recently for a data migration where the users asked if they still need to enter meta data for documents they just could use AI to query data that was usually based on that meta data.

They trust AI before it's even there and don't even consider a transition period where they check if the result are correct.

Like with security convenience prevails.

> All of these companies are selling AI as a tool to do work for you, and the AI _sounds confident_ not matter what it spits out.

If your LLM + pre-prompt setup sounds confident with every response, something is probably wrong; it doesn't have to be that way. It isn't for me. I haven't collected statistics, but I often get decent nuance back from Claude.

Think more about what you're doing and experiment. Try different pre-prompts. Try different conversation styles.

This is not dismissing the tendency for overconfidence, sycophancy, and more. I'm just sharing some mitigations.

Doesn‘t mean listing logical points makes it a rant

Pluto? Plotto? Platti?

Seriously though, that's a horrible bowdlerization of the argument in the Phaedrus. It's actually very subtle and interesting, not just reactionary griping.

> The value of an attention span is non zero, but if the speed of access to information is close to zero, how do these relate?

Gell-Mann Amnesia. Attention span limits the amount information of information we can process and with attention spans decreasing, increases to information flow stop having a positive effect. People simply forget what they started with even if that contradicts previous information.

> If I can solve two problems in a near constant time that is a few hours, what is the value of solving the problem which takes days to reason through?

You don't end up solving the problem in near constant time, you end up applying the last suggested solution. There's a difference.