# AI is wonderful and will make your life better! (not)
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117
**Category:** The BBQ Pit
**Tags:** ai
**Created:** [July 20, 2025, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117 "2025-07-20T16:40:05Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 51
### Author:  [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2026, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1001 "2026-03-18T21:50:30Z")
I’m pretty sure there isn’t one. The point was that when asked to explain the joke, the AI hallucinated a whole Far Side comic that never existed.
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### Author:  [@billy-jack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billy-jack)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2026, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1002 "2026-03-18T22:31:59Z")
I didn’t consider that possibility.
Thanks.
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### Author:  [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2026, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1003 "2026-03-18T23:06:24Z")
Gemini 3.0 Pro sez the following about the cartoon:
> [@](#):
>
> **Assessing the Visuals**
>
> I’ve begun dissecting the “Far Side” cartoon, focusing on its visual elements and their deviation from expectations.
>
> **Analyzing the Elements**
>
> I’ve determined the structure functions as an obstacle, possibly a maze or part of an agility course for dogs.
>
> **Analyzing the Far Side**
>
> I’m now zeroing in on the object making up the wall’s peculiar cross-section.
>
> **Interpreting the Absurdity**
>
> I’ve zeroed in on the humor: the Great Wall’s over-the-top scale to contain one persistent dog.
>
> **Defining the Context**
>
> I’ve established the key contextual element: two guards chatting on the Great Wall of China’s immense scale.
>
> **Analyzing the Humor**
>
> I’ve outlined the joke’s structure: setting, punchline, comedic device, and refined the response accordingly.
(The above is the “thinking”. Below is the output.)
> [@](#):
>
> The humor in this _Far Side_ comic by Gary Larson comes from **extreme exaggeration and the subversion of history**.
>
> Here is a breakdown of why it works:
>
> - **The Visual Setup:** The image clearly depicts the Great Wall of China—a monumental, world-wonder-scale fortification that took centuries to build. Historically, it was designed to protect the Chinese Empire from massive, heavily armed invading armies and nomadic hordes (like the Mongols).
> - **The Punchline:** The caption reveals that these guards didn’t build this incredible, sweeping structure to fend off an invading empire. Instead, they built it for a completely mundane, everyday suburban reason: to keep out one annoying, pesky neighborhood dog.
> - **The Comedic Device:** The joke relies on the absurdity of a wildly disproportionate response. Larson takes one of the greatest engineering feats in human history and reduces its grand purpose to solving a minor, highly relatable domestic annoyance.
>
> Would you like me to analyze the humor in any other cartoons or images?
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### Author:  [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2026, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1004 "2026-03-18T23:12:50Z")
Almost word for word what I got from Gemini. I asked how it explained it, and it gave me a bunch of stuff about contextual humor. Then I asked if that was really how it did it, and:
> ## 1. The “TV Tropes” Effect
>
> This specific strip is often cited in books and websites as a prime example of the **“There Is No Kill Like Overkill”** trope. Because people have written about this cartoon online to explain Larson’s style, I have processed those discussions. I’m not just looking at the image; I’m “remembering” how culture has categorized it.
>
> ## 2. The Gary Larson Pattern
>
> My training includes thousands of _Far Side_ comics. I’ve learned that Larson has a “signature moveset.” If I see a dog and a historical setting, I already “know” the joke is likely about:
>
> - **Petty human behavior** being projected onto a grand scale.
> - **The “mundane twist”** (taking something massive and making it about a neighborly dispute).
>
> ## 3. Visual “Tags”
>
> When I “see” this image, I don’t just see pixels. I see tags like: `[Great Wall of China] [Guards] [Spears] [Gary Larson Art Style] [Dog Reference]` The moment the word “dog” appears in the caption, my “logic” connects it to the historical tag for the Great Wall. The “humor” is essentially the mathematical friction between those two data points.
>
> **In short:** I didn’t have to “think” about it from scratch because I’ve “read” how thousands of humans have already reacted to it. I’m essentially giving you the **consensus of human intuition** mixed with a bit of logic.
I mean, that also might be a made-up explanation, but it’s interesting.
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### Author:  [@Guest-starring\_Id](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guest-starring_Id)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2026, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1005 "2026-03-18T23:51:12Z")
> [@JackieLikesVariety](#):
>
> are you being sarcastic? because this strikes me as terrible unless you plan to prey on the young, mental ill, and just pretty much every lonely stressed human by selling them and training them to rely on fake “friends” by _hacking the ability to form human attachments._
Another “I can’t speak for…” post - this one in regards to **Maserschmidt** …
I’d say the poster was being sarcastic, given that the posted quote seemed quite reproving.
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### Author:  [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)
#### Post date: [March 18, 2026, 11:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1006 "2026-03-18T23:58:37Z")
> [@scabpicker](#):
>
> Ok, but has anyone ever seen a Far Side comic involving scientists and fitting a dog into a particular space? Because I can’t think of one.
Well, there’s this one involving a scientist: 😁
[ ](https://static0.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/far-side-canine-decoder.jpg?q=70&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=1)
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### Author:  [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)
#### Post date: [March 19, 2026, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1007 "2026-03-19T00:00:24Z")
> [@Guest-starring\_Id](#):
>
> I’d say the poster was being sarcastic, given that the posted quote seemed quite reproving.
Yes indeed.
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### Author:  [@scabpicker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scabpicker)
#### Post date: [March 19, 2026, 4:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1008 "2026-03-19T04:56:13Z")
> [@Miller](#):
>
> I’m pretty sure there isn’t one. The point was that when asked to explain the joke, the AI hallucinated a whole Far Side comic that never existed.
Yeah, I figured that is what happened, but it hadn’t really been made clear.
> [@wolfpup](#):
>
> Well, there’s this one involving a scientist: 😁
Heheh, yeah, but it really doesn’t fit the bill.
Damn, Larson is a genius when he’s on.
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### Author:  [@billy-jack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billy-jack)
#### Post date: [March 19, 2026, 10:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1009 "2026-03-19T10:53:07Z")
AI in Medicine?
This was in a newsletter I received last night from a mailing list:
> **As of 9 Feb 2026, over 1,350 medical devices utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) were Food and Drug Administration-approved. These medical devices were linked to 182 product recalls, approximately 43% of which occurred under a year after implementation. According to litigation, some of the AI-enhanced medical devices led to surgical errors with life-altering consequences, while others misidentified human body parts.**
>
> Acclarent’s TruDi Navigation System, an AI-assisted chronic sinusitis (sinus inflammation) treatment, allegedly malfunctioned on multiple occasions during surgery leading to to a **puncture of the base of one patient’s skull, and strokes after a major arterial injury to two additional patients while doctors were using the TruDi Navigation System.**
>
> Unrelated to TruDi, **an AI-assisted heart monitor in production by Medtronic failed to recognize serious irregularities with patients’ heartbeats on at least 16 different occasions.**
>
> A different AI tool named Sonio Detect, built to assist with fetal imagery in prenatal ultrasounds, was found in June 2025 to be **misidentifying body parts** , though no safety issues were identified.
Also in the newsletter:
> There are reports of big tech companies beginning to re-hire developers who were laid off in great numbers last year and replaced by AI, due to coding errors created by AI tools.
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### Author:  [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)
#### Post date: [March 19, 2026, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1010 "2026-03-19T21:56:30Z")
This is interesting, and un-promising. These researchers took real-world production code sets and used different LLMs to update them. The LLMs ran tests, identified what was missing, and wrote code to fill the gaps.
In doing so, they frequently broke code that was already working. Claude Opus was the best performer, managing to avoid breaking anything in just over half the test cases. Every other LLM broke existing code even more often.
They break the code, despite also ‘seeing’ tests results for the currently-working code.
Seems not good.
[SWE-CI: Evaluating Agent Capabilities in Maintaining Codebases via Continuous Integration](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.03823)
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### Author:  [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)
#### Post date: [March 20, 2026, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1011 "2026-03-20T22:26:56Z")
Awesome. Now maybe it can explain “cow tools.”
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### Author:  [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)
#### Post date: [March 21, 2026, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1012 "2026-03-21T16:48:18Z")
> [@pulykamell](#):
>
> Now maybe it can explain “cow tools.”
I don’t know if you’re just joking, but “cow tools” for some reason has mystified some people. Larson made **a lot** of cartoons about cows, most of them implying that they weren’t very bright, so if they made tools, they would be pretty crappy ones.
OTOH, there’s this one suggesting we may be underestimating them:
[ ](https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/2019/12/20/EIU433XWRFBTFLTS5KHHDEWQHM.jpg)
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### Author:  [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)
#### Post date: [March 21, 2026, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1013 "2026-03-21T18:01:31Z")
> [@wolfpup](#):
>
> I don’t know if you’re just joking, but “cow tools” for some reason has mystified some people.
It’s kind of infamous for being his most abstract, surreal, and non-sensical panel. Didn’t even he himself have something negative to say about it?
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### Author:  [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)
#### Post date: [March 21, 2026, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1014 "2026-03-21T18:06:46Z")
IIRC, he regrets making one of the tools look vaguely like a handsaw, which inspired people to try to figure out the functions of the others, when the point was that they were all supposed to be inexplicable.
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### Author:  [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)
#### Post date: [March 21, 2026, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1015 "2026-03-21T21:30:01Z")
Cow tools.
> **[Meet Veronika, the first cow known to engage in flexible, multipurpose tool use](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-ever-flexible-tool-use-seen-in-a-cow-suggests-livestock-are-smarter/)**
>
> A pet cow named Veronika uses a tool in a surprisingly sophisticated way—possibly because she has been allowed to live her best life
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### Author:  [@billy-jack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billy-jack)
#### Post date: [March 22, 2026, 10:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1016 "2026-03-22T10:50:40Z")
A pet cow? That seems reasonable.
Years ago when a niece of mine was about five years old, we got a load of cattle in one day and one of the steers was very tame. We were surprised to see that he actually sought out human company.
The steer and my niece really bonded. She was maybe five years old and 40 pounds and the steer was around 500 pounds. That steer would follow her around as if it was a pet dog.
She named him Cutie Pie.
We kept Cutie Pie on the farm as a pet instead of putting him in a feed yard with the rest of the cattle.
Sometimes I wondered if my niece was Cutie Pie’s pet.
When my niece was in elementary school and junior high, she would often bring some of her friends out to the farm and introduce them to Cutie Pie. By that time, Cutie Pie was quite large and my niece’s friends were always a bit cautious around him.
In his later years, Cutie Pie wasn’t even penned up much of the time. He showed no desire to wonder off.
Finally, when my niece was in college and Cutie Pie was having trouble getting around, we had him butchered and all the meat ground up, and we donated it all to the food pantry in a nearby town.
Cutie Pie had quite a peaceful life on the farm.
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### Author:  [@Guest-starring\_Id](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guest-starring_Id)
#### Post date: [March 22, 2026, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1017 "2026-03-22T17:15:01Z")
Yaaaay Cutie Pie 🐄 ❤
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### Author:  [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)
#### Post date: [March 23, 2026, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1018 "2026-03-23T16:48:31Z")
A sitting Senator and erstwhile Presidential candidate “interviewed” Claude and got to the truth of what is happening! Claude is great for these things.
Or great at agreement. You decide.
[Bernie Sanders “Interviewed” A Chatbot To Expose AI’s Secrets. It Has No Secrets. It Just Agrees With You. | Techdirt](https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/23/bernie-sanders-interviewed-a-chatbot-to-expose-ais-secrets-it-has-no-secrets-it-just-agrees-with-you/)
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### Author:  [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)
#### Post date: [March 23, 2026, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1019 "2026-03-23T17:26:49Z")
> [@Maserschmidt](#):
>
> Or great at agreement. You decide.
OK, I’ve decided. Look at this quote from the article:
> But that’s ridiculous if you actually understand how this stuff works (which Sanders clearly does not). When you “interview” a large language model you are talking to a very sophisticated text prediction system that is specifically designed to give you responses that are (possibly) helpful, (hopefully) relevant, and (obsequiously) agreeable — shaped entirely by how you framed the question. It’s not there to help you uncover hidden truths …
I acknowledge that there are some grains of truth there, and I’m sure Sanders doesn’t understand the internal workings of LLMs, but apparently Masnick equally doesn’t understand the deep subtleties that underlie LLM capabilities at very large scales. So what he dismisses as just “a text prediction system” is indeed capable of uncovering profoundly important and useful truths about our world. I’ve seen it do it, and in fact I think we’re seeing a lot of it in the Sanders “interview”, though I can’t vouch for the reliability of Claude.
And the idea that it’s sycophantic and so will always agree with you is mostly a bullshit illusion. It’s true to the extent that the way you frame your prompt will definitely shape its response. This has been discussed and acknowledged here. But it’s bullshit in the sense that it’s always been clear when GPT was disagreeing with some proposition that I presented to it. No, ChatGPT never says “that’s ridiculous”. It acts more like a tutor to a very sensitive child – it’s more apt to say things like, “you’re asking the right kinds of questions, but here’s why these things are easy to misinterpret”, “here are things you should consider”, and so on.
That is absolutely **not** in any way the same as parroting your own beliefs back to you. But I’m talking about factual matters, like questions I frequently ask about cosmology and quantum physics. I’m sure that in philosophical and religious areas you may be able to get it to agree with anything, but neither is that an objective test of anything useful.
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### Author:  [@steronz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/steronz)
#### Post date: [March 23, 2026, 6:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ai-is-wonderful-and-will-make-your-life-better-not/1021117/1020 "2026-03-23T18:35:21Z")
The problem, of course, is that it’s impossible to know if it’s uncovering profoundly important and useful truths about our world, or if it’s spouting nonsense. It will do either with convincing confidence; parsing hallucinations from whatever gems you seek requires knowing the gems in the first place so that you can vet whatever you’re reading.
I agree that no LLM is an agreement-bot – even if you try to get it to say there are 5 lights, it will usually refuse. The important behavior that I think people need to understand is that it’s training goal is, oversimplified, to produce text that humans will think is convincingly produced by a human. What sort of human depends on the implementation, but at the end of the day, these are chatbots that are trying to “pass” a very difficult version of a Turing test.
An LLM that consistently repeats back whatever the user wants to hear is not going to rate high on this metric – people will say, “Wait, I’m talking to a robot.” So it needs to develop a bit of a personality, it needs to be able to disagree with you, it needs to appear level-headed and consider both sides. But at no point is any of this trying to produce a _correct_ response.
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