Post #4164535
2026-07-28 10:49 UTC
In other words, I lack the discernment to evaluate the output of the chatbot that Tao exchanged theories with. If you showed me an equally opaque transcript of a "conversation" between a chatbot and a crank with AI psychosis whose math made no sense whatsoever, I couldn't make an *a priori* judgment about which one was a solid piece of mathematical theorizing and which one was a math-flavored word-salad.
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Replies (1)
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr 2026-07-28 10:51
As many skilled programmers can attest, chatbots can produce very useful output - but as even the most ardent AI-assisted coder will admit, chatbot code is also full of baffling, obvious errors (and subtle, hard-to-spot ones): https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs These errors (which the industry wants us to refer to as "hallucination" - a whimsical, obscuring, anthropomorphizing euphemism) are the reason that reliable AI use requires the discernment that comes from skill and expertise. 4/