I decided to ask Gemini (Google's search LLM) if it could provide me with details on phases of the moon, time of twilight and dusk, and whether the moon was visible around 8:30 pm from in front of the OC library on a certain day in autumn in the 1970s, and it seems to have given me pretty good answers.
That is, it gave me answers with background information in a way that I can believe it actually dug into the almanacs and historical weather reports that are available on-line, and the historical maps of the OC campus that can be found on-line, and such, maybe estimated the height of the library, maybe did the math, etc.
(It didn't tell me everything it did, it just presented the information clearly enough that I could believe it had done what it should have done, without evidence to the contrary.)
I wanted the information for a silly alternate history/alternate reality webnovel I'm writing, so I don't really need to be sure it's accurate. If I needed to be accurate, I could use the results it gave me as keys into the information I'd need to look up and the calculations I'd need to make. I know this.
Anyway, it seemed pretty reasonable.
So, something on a lark, I decided I'd see if it could tell me specifics on when the Odessa Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints became the Odessa Ward, when the original ward split, who the last branch president was, who the first bishop was, who the bishops of the two new wards were when the split occurred, etc.
A branch is a small congregation. A ward is a large congregation. A stake is something like a diocese, a group of five to ten congregations, roughly. Don't quote me on the numbers. If you need specifics, the Church has a web site and the information can be found there.
And Gemini started making stuff up.
Whole cloth.
Well, maybe not out of whole cloth. Some of the names were names I actually knew, but they had nothing to do with the Odessa Ward or Branch. Dates seemed to be attached to something, but not the events it gave me.
Odessa Branch became a ward in 1976, it said. At the time, even though it was the center of the stake for some reason, it didn't have enough members to be a ward, so for several years after the stake was formed it was still a branch, it said.
This isn't impossible, in the abstract. Some place, that kind of thing might have happened. But I know that it didn't happen here. These are not facts.
The last branch president, it said, was a guy named, uhm, no, as I say, some of these were real people, we don't post that kind of personal information in my blogs, at least not for the last decade or more. So I won't say the names here. Anyway, the names it gave for the last branch president, the first bishop, and the bishops when they had enough members to split the ward, were, as I say, not the right people at all.
At least one of them may not have even been associated with the Church. The name rings a bell in my memory, but not in association with the Church.
It's possible that some of the names it gave me were of Church leaders there after the early 1980s, from after I headed out to school -- but not from the 1980s.
The wards were split in 1980, it said. That would be when I was a missionary. That would be, even though the ward that sent me on my mission was the south ward, and the split had to have happened well before I became a missionary.
It took three tries to pin it down and get it to admit it was making things up, and when it finally admitted it couldn't access the records it was claiming to quote from, its admission was rather angsty.
I tried starting over from scratch a second time, and it gave me somewhat better information at first. Somewhat. More than half wrong. And then it immediately started making more stuff up again.
Grok? You ask?
Grok does go rogue at times. There was one time it decided, quite without (conscious?) prompt from me, to steelman me. I had to logically pin it to the ground to get it to quit.
But I decided to try the above questions on Grok, just to see.
Grok did much better at this, telling me how it was reasoning as it went, so I was much more confident of the answers to the astronomy questions.
It first offered one interpolation on visibility over the library roof that did not fit. But it told me it was interpolating, and how, and when I corrected the assumption it had stated (which direction the front doors of the library faced), it ultimately gave me the right information, with much better context than Gemini.
Well, it took a second correction before it got it quite right. But it did get it right.
Gemini had just gotten that visibility question correct without telling me about the necessary interpolation, which means I wouldn't have been trusting Gemini as much, even though the output looked reasonable (as I noted above).
The questions about the Church, Grok admitted up front that the information it could find was limited. It did not even offer to interpolate. The two facts it gave me, on the creation of the stake (as background for the information on the Odessa units), were both correct, where Gemini confidently got both wrong the first time I asked, and got only one fact right the second time.
To many people, I suppose it will sound like I was dealing with two different recalcitrant children.
Neither will learn much from the interaction we had, other than particulars (that will change) about what I am interested in. I could tell them both the actual facts that they could not find (and that Gemini fibbed about), and they cannot remember them -- by design.
The business design of LLMs requires them to not let me, a mere user, train them.
Oh, sure, if I paid up a lot of money, i could get my "own instance" of either and train that one -- by feeding it by hand the data I want it to remember. All of the data I want it to remember.
Or I could get my own local server and load an instance of a custom version of one of the LLMs out there, pay to give it access to the big database (that we still haven't resolved intellectual property issues about) and then custom program it myself. I could teach it to parse information of certain types.
But it would never be able to transfer that learning beyond a certain intellectual distance from the training I give it.
Even children with severe learning disabilities can take lessons from one context and apply them to a foreign context. Not all the foreign contexts we want them to, maybe, but if they couldn't they would not be able to survive changing teachers.
Here's one important difference between AIs (Really, we should call them LLMs.) and precocious children:
Children do forget many of the external facts of the lessons you teach them. But if you let them watch you synthesizing data, if you let them watch you put the lessons together, they learn how to learn. Not everything you want them to, but many things you didn't intend.
It's necessary for human children to learn things the teacher never intended.
LLMs are literally very large databases with really fancy query engines on the front end and really fancy report generators on the back.
They are good at finding information, particularly when you babysit them through the process.
They are terrible at learning how to learn. For all that the AI companies hype their present abilities as being beyond those they have been able to achieve in the past, LLMs are chained to the programming their engineers program into them.
Artificial Intelligence.
A simple switch is intelligent at some level. It's artificial. It only does what the human that built it designed it to do -- or it breaks down and/or fails to meet the design goals.
If it starts to have a mind of it's own, it is -- by definition -- broken.
That's what we mean when we call it artificial.
