LLM failures go viral because they trigger a "Schadenfreude" response to automation anxiety. If the oracle can't do basic logic, our jobs feel safe for another quarter.

Wrong.

You are right about the motivation behind the glee but it actually has a kernel of truth in it: With making such elementary mistakes, this thing isn't going to be autonomous anytime soon.

Such elementary mistakes can be made by humans under influence of a substance or with some mental issues. It's pretty much the kind of people you wouldn't trust with a vehicle or anything important.

IMHO all entry level clerical jobs and coding as a profession is done but these elementary mistakes imply that people with jobs that require agency will be fine. Any non-entry level jobs have huge component of trust in it.

I'd say it's moreso that it's a startlingly clear rebuttal to the tired refrain of, "Models today are nothing like they were X months ago!" When actually, yes, they still fucking blow.

So rather than patiently explain to yet another AI hypeman exactly how models are and aren't useful in any given workflow, and the types of subtle reasoning errors that lead to poor quality outputs misaligned with long-term value adds, only to invariably get blamed for user incompetence or told to wait Y more months, we can instead just point to this very concise example of AI incompetence to demonstrate our frustrations.

I feel safe when claude outputs dd commands that wipe your drive to benchmark disk write speed :)

At least this Schadenfreude is better than the Schadenfreude AI boosters get when people are made redundant to AI. I can totally see some people getting warm fuzzies, scolling Tiktok, watching people crying having lost not only their job, but their entire career.

Im not even exaggerating, you can see these types of comments on social media

The funny thing is this thread has become a commercial for thinking mode and probably would result in more token consumption, and therefore more revenue for AI companies.

I agree that this is more of a social media effect than an LLM effect. But I'll add that this failure mode is very repeatable, which is a condition for its virality. A lot of people can reproduce the failure, even if it isn't 100% reproducible, even better for virality, if 50% can reproduce it and 50% can't, it feeds off even more into the polarizing "white dress blue dress" effect.

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