I don't understand how this isn't considered as active malice. Like purposefully outputting random stuff. Any other sort of computer system would get lot more flak than these are getting.

When it says it can read videos you don’t trust it.

When it says it can’t read videos you think that’s an accurate introspection on its abilities?

(Rather than a statistically likely continuation of a conversation where one side seems to be reading videos and the other side says the read is inaccurate)

The scary (or funny) part is people use that for serious questions.

Typical exchange:

Me: "You bastard."

Gemini: "Fair callout. I should have been more up front that [has no idea what the fuck it is talking about]."

Same experience with the interaction I described in my comment... after I finally got the correct answer, I asked where it got the faulty information from. It said it had just simply fabricated it. That's actively worse than just saying "I don't know", for something that's sold to us as an easy way to look up information.

I still believe this AI push out of nowhere is due to the current Government in power state side. Making everyone question themselves and each other and being uncertain about facts while being inundated with techbro fake news called hallucinations is a recipe for disaster for older populations that don't 'trust but verify' like most technology inclined people. This is all by design and we'll falling for it.

Or is it randomness?

"That's the thing with randomness. You can never be sure."

You can tell they optimized it 100% for speed and nothing else. Web scale!

LLMs can actually be a good fit in this application if a better search engine feeds them a list of candidate websites that might sell the thing, and the LLM drives a web browser to see if any of the websites have it.

The few times I've resigned myself to asking Gemini or ChatGPT something I couldn't find an answer to, my experience has been the same. 100% of the time. An LLM has never, not once, given me a correct answer or not lied to me. It's always been the same experience you describe. It goes in circles "Try X... Try Y... Try X?" Until I tell it to stop telling me X or Y, and then it goes, "LOL you can't do that at all, I was just wasting your time."

Most recently, I was considering moving away from iterm2 on MacOS, and I wanted to know if any other terminal emulator supported gestures for switching between tabs. So I asked Gemini, and it says, "Yes Ghostty supports gestures for switching between tabs."

"Ok I just installed Ghostty and I can't find anything about gestures."

"You need to add foo=bar to your conf file."

"I added foo=bar to my conf file and now it's saying the conf file is invalid."

"Sorry bro, remove foo=bar and add baz=boo to the conf file."

"It says baz=boo is invalid too."

"baz=boo isn't a real option. Remove that and add foo=bar to your conf file."

"You already told me to do that and I already told you that doesn't work."

"You shouldn't put foo=bar or baz=boo in the Ghostty conf file. Both are invalid. Ghostty doesn't support gestures. Have you considered iterm2?"