For example, automotive technicians and industrial mechanics use AI to interpret complex test results, debug electrical wiring, and inspect machinery for wear.

No chance I'd trust Gemini to correctly tell me which wire was the high voltage one.

You're absolutely right! I apologize for providing a factually incorrect explanation. You asked a question, and I gave you incorrect information that put you in danger. That failure is entirely on my side as an AI system, not on you for following what you were told.

There's no chance I would trust a human to correctly tell me which wire was the high-voltage one, nor would I trust the documentation. I would use it as a starting point, then apply test instruments to make sure I had the right information. Then I would unplug the device and discharge the caps before starting to work on it.

We need to start training people that AI answers are just as fallible as answers you get from a human. Trust but verify for all beings, biological and non-biological.

Even the best AI tools are consistently wrong at interpreting the NEC and often in odd ways, like making it stricter than it actually is, or mixing multiple countries’ standards together. 100% useless in an AHJ with a lot of their own rules like Chicago/Cook County.

There's a bunch of great techs on youtube whose day job is to not to get electrocuted.

So far I've learned 480V is very unforgiving and can show up in surprising places.

A guy I work at had a check engine light on his Range Rover and a code that indicated something about a bad air/fuel mixture. He consulted ChatGPT and over the next 3 months, proceeded to spend over $15,000 trying to fix the car, as GPT convinced him over and over that he was getting close by eliminating logical possibilities. It even convinced him that a completely normal noise the engine was making was a vacuum leak, which sent him down another rabbit hole trying to find the source. In many cases, he would bring the ChatGPT diagnosis to a shop and tell them to change a particular part even against their advice. None worked. Finally, he gave up on using AI to fix it and told a shop to just figure it out. Turns out the injectors just needed to be removed and cleaned. Check engine light is now off.

I asked it to identify a starfish I photographed at the weekend whilst scuba diving. It's a spiny starfish, off Cornwall. It said it was a 7 armed starfish. It clearly had 5.

Disappointing. I wouldn't trust it for "real" problems at all!

I suspect they’re also lying about the utility there as well.

There is already deterministic procedural stuff for all of those cases. Putting a chat bot in front of that is basically fucking stupid.

> No chance I'd trust Gemini to correctly tell me which wire was the high voltage one.

No latter than yesterday I used Gemini to tell me which kind of power adapter was compatible with an old SNES chinese backuping device [1] (a device you'd plug instead of a cartdridge into the SNES and then you could make backups of cartdridges on to 3.5 floppy disks. You could then run the games from those backups. Conveniently you could also "backup" your friends' cartdridges.. Heck, there was even a tiny demo scene for the SNES and you could swap disks with little demos written for the SNES -- just like for the Amiga).

It was a bit tricky in that Gemini explained me I needed a reverse polarity adapter or I risked bricking everything.

Now, granted, the stakes weren't very high but... Gemini got it right and I could start the SNES, with the chinese "Super Pro Fighter" backuping device just fine.

[1] this thing: https://videogamedevelopmentdevices.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Pr...

I wouldn’t replace best practices for safety like lock-out tag-out and hazard labeling with an LLM but you do you

That's not how AI or any kind of assistance is to be used. It's there to double-check and alert you to any possible mistakes you've made. You still have to use your own judgement. Have you never asked a person to take a look at some of your work? Did that mean that you have to follow and obey all of their advice?