this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found.

Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry. The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a questions on notice at the Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence.

The test involved testing generative AI models before selecting one to ingest five submissions from a parliamentary inquiry into audit and consultancy firms. The most promising model, Meta’s open source model Llama2-70B, was prompted to summarise the submissions with a focus on ASIC mentions, recommendations, references to more regulation, and to include the page references and context.

Ten ASIC staff, of varying levels of seniority, were also given the same task with similar prompts. Then, a group of reviewers blindly assessed the summaries produced by both humans and AI for coherency, length, ASIC references, regulation references and for identifying recommendations. They were unaware that this exercise involved AI at all.

These reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47%.

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[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 166 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Well, not every metric. I bet the computers generated them way faster, lol. :P

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 111 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And for a much much smaller paycheck.

All corporate gives af about.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 59 points 2 months ago (10 children)

It might be all I care about. Humans might always be better, but AI only has to be good enough at something to be valuable.

For example, summarizing an article might be incredibly low stakes (I’m feeling a bit curious today), or incredibly high stakes (I’m preparing a legal defense), depending on the context. An AI is sufficient for one use but not the other.

[–] greenskye@lemm.ee 25 points 2 months ago (1 children)

And you can absolutely trust that tons of executives will definitely not understand this distinction and will use AI even in areas where it's actively harmful.

[–] Mrkawfee@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They'll use it until it blows up in their faces and then they will all backtrack. Executives are like startled cattle.

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[–] fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This is a really valid point, especially because it's not only faster but dramatically cheaper.

The thing is, summaries which are pretty terrible might be costly. If decision makers are relying on these summaries and they're inaccurate, then the consequences might be immeasurable.

Suppose you're considering 2 cars, one is very cheap but on one random day per month it just won't start, the other is 5x the price but will work every day. If you really need the car to get to work, then the one that randomly doesn't start might be worse than no car at all.

[–] PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Are we sure it's cheaper though? I mean it legitimatly might not be. I have some friends who work in tech and they use an AI model for, amongst other things, summarizing information on their internal documentation. They've told me what their company is paying for the license to use this thing, and it's eyewatering. also, uhh last time I checked, the company they got that license from does not turn a profit... so it appears to be too cheap at the moment.

It might really be the case that it isn't cheaper than just paying someone a normal salary to do that work, and it probably isn't cheaper than just jamming the work being done by the AI now back onto preexisting employees (which is what they did before ~2 years ago anyway).

The other thing that makes me feel this might not be unreasonable is that everyone on the team likes the tool, except their manager, who has thrown out the idea to cut it twice now (that I know of).

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[–] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 42 points 2 months ago (6 children)

LLMs == AGI was and continues to be a massive lie perpetuated by tech companies and investors that people still have not woken up to.

[–] ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee 10 points 2 months ago (8 children)

Who is claiming that LLMs are generally intelligent? Is it just "they" or can you actually name a company?

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago

I think the idea is that every company is dumping money into LLMs and no other form of alternative AI development to the point that all AI research is LLM based and therefore to investors and those involved, it’s effectively the only only avenue to AGI, though that’s likely not true

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[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 30 points 2 months ago (7 children)

"Just one more training on a social network"

Can't wait for the bouble to burst.

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[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 27 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Ten ASIC staff, of varying levels of seniority, were also given the same task with similar prompts.

This is the key line here. These are likely university educated staff with significant experience in writing and summarising information and they were specifically tasked with this. However, within the social media landscape (Lemmy, reddit, etc) AI is already better at summarising information than humans because most human social media users are fucking retarded and spend their time either a) not reading properly/at all or b) cherrypicking information to fit whatever flavour of impassioned narrative they are trying to sell to everyone else.

Just some very recent examples I've seen of Lemmy users proving they are completely incapable of parsing relevant information are that article about an alternative, universal and non-proprietary database called GetGee which everyone seemed to think was an article about whether TikTok should be banned (because the word TikTok was in the title and that tricked their monkey brains) or the update to the 404 Media story on "active listening" in which people responded as if this technology exists and is in use when 404 Media still haven't been able to confirm either of these things. The second one was particularly egregious because it got picked up by all kinds of tech-related YouTube channels and news sites and regurgitated by their viewers and readers without a single one of these people ever bothering to read the source material properly.

Lemmy users proving they are completely incapable of parsing relevant information

To be fair, you need to actually read the article to be able to summarize it.

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[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 22 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Not a stock market person or anything at all ... but NVIDIA's stock has been oscillating since July and has been falling for about a 2 weeks (see Yahoo finance).

What are the chances that this is the investors getting cold feet about the AI hype? There were open reports from some major banks/investors about a month or so ago raising questions about the business models (right?). I've seen a business/analysis report on AI, despite trying to trumpet it, actually contain data on growing uncertainties about its capability from those actually trying to implement, deploy and us it.

I'd wager that the situation right now is full a lot of tension with plenty of conflicting opinions from different groups of people, almost none of which actually knowing much about generative-AI/LLMs and all having different and competing stakes and interests.

[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 17 points 2 months ago (2 children)

"What are the chances..."

Approximately 100%.

That doesn't mean that the slide will absolutely continue. There may be some fresh injection of hype that will push investor confidence back up, but right now the wind is definitely going out of the sails.

The core issue, as the Goldman - Sachs report notes, is that AI is currently being valued as a trillion dollar industry, but it has not remotely demonstrated the ability to solve a trillion dollar problem.

No one selling AI tools is able to demonstrate with confidence that they can be made reliable enough, or cheap enough, to truly replace the human element, and without that they will only ever be fun curiosities.

And that "cheap enough" part is critical. It is not only that GenAI is deeply unreliable, but also that it costs a truly staggering amount of money to operate (OpenAI are burning something like $10 billion a year). What's the point in replacing an employee you pay $10 an hour to handle customer service issues with a bot that costs $5 for every reply it generates?

[–] kautau@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah we are on the precipice of a massive bubble about to burst because, like the dot com bubble magic promises are being made by and to people who don’t understand the tech as if it is some magic that will net incredible profits just by pursuing it. LLMs have great applications in specific things, but they are being thrown in every direction to see where they will stick and the magic payoff will come

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[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago

Yea, the "cheaper than droids" line in Andor feels strangely prescient ATM.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

What are the chances that this is the investors getting cold feet about the AI hype?

Investors have proven over and over they’re credulous idiots who understand sweet fuck-all about technology and will throw money at whatever’s in their face. Creepy Sam and the Microshits will trot out some more useless garbage and prize a few more billion out of the market in just a little while.

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[–] simple@lemm.ee 22 points 2 months ago (7 children)

The most promising model, Meta’s open source model Llama2-70B, was prompted to summarise the submissions

Llama 2 is insanely outdated and significantly worse than Llama3.1, so this article doesn't mean much.

[–] Gloria@sh.itjust.works 29 points 2 months ago (5 children)

On July 18, 2023, in partnership with Microsoft, Meta announced Llama 2 On April 18, 2024, Meta released Llama-3

L2 it’s one year old. A study like that takes time. What is your point? I bet if they would do it with L3 and the result came back similar, you would say L3 is „insanely outdaded“ as well?

Can you confirm that you think with L3, the result would look completely opposite and the summaries of the AI would always beat the human summaries? Because it sounds like you are implying that.

[–] redscroll@lemmy.ml 18 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

We know the performance of L2-70b to be on par with L3-8b, just to put the difference in perspective. Surely they models continue to improve and we can only hope the same improvements will be found in L4, but I think the point is that models have improved dramatically since this study was run and they have put in way more attention in the fine-tuning and alignment phase of training, specifically for these kinds of tasks. Not saying this means the models would beat the human summaries everytime (very likely not), but at the very least the disparity between them wouldn't be nearly as large. Ultimately, human summaries will always be "ground truth", so it's hard to see how models will beat humans, but they can get close.

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[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 21 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I would expect "faster" to be a way

[–] nutsack@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)
[–] GetOffMyLan@programming.dev 7 points 2 months ago

"I can easily do it on my phone" is also good.

[–] ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (22 children)

The important thing here isn't that the AI is worse than humans. It's than the AI is worth comparing to humans. Humans stay the same while software can quickly improve by orders of magnitude.

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[–] dreaddynaughty@lemmynsfw.com 18 points 2 months ago

This is an old study, they tested University level adults against the standard Llama2-70B.

Kinda absolete now, the model has completely fallen out of use, for the newer and far better 3 and 3.1 Versions. It also wasnt fine tuned for summarization, and while base L2-70B was OK, it wasnt great at anything without fine tuning.

This clickbait title also sounds like self gratification, the abysmal reading comprehension in the Internet is directly counter to it. The average human found on the Internet doesnt approch the level of literary capabilities, that those ten human testers showed in the study.

[–] jawa21@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 2 months ago

This reminds me. What happened to that tldr bot? I did appreciate the summaries, even if they weren't perfect.

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Meanwhile, here's an excerpt of a response from Claude Opus on me tasking it to evaluate intertextuality between the Gospel of Matthew and Thomas from the perspective of entropy reduction with redactional efforts due to human difficulty at randomness (this doesn't exist in scholarship outside of a single Reddit comment I made years ago in /r/AcademicBiblical lacking specific details) on page 300 of a chat about completely different topics:

Yeah, sure, humans would be so much better at this level of analysis within around 30 seconds. (It's also worth noting that Claude 3 Opus doesn't have the full context of the Gospel of Thomas accessible to it, so it needs to try to reason through entropic differences primarily based on records relating to intertextual overlaps that have been widely discussed in consensus literature and are thus accessible).

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 8 points 2 months ago

My guess ist that even if it would be better when it comes to generic text, most of the texts which really mean something have a lot of context around them which a model will know nothing about and thus will not know what is important to the people working with this topic and what is not.

[–] DarkCloud@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

"AI" or Large Language Models, are designed by definition to give averaged answers. So they're not just averaging on the text you give them, they're averaging it with all general text of the training model, to create a probabilistically average result based on all of it.

There's no way around this, because it's simply how such systems work. It's their lifeblood to produce a "best guess" across large amounts of training data ...which is done by averaging out all that language. A large amount of language... Hence the name.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarizing documents

In every way? How about speed? The goal is to save human time so if AI is faster and the summary is good enough, then it is a success. I guarantee it is faster. Much faster.

[–] loonsun@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 months ago

If you make enough mistakes, speed is a detriment not a benefit. Increasing speed allows you to produce more summaries but if you still need to correct and edit them all you've done is add a step where a human has to still read the document to the level where they could summarize it and edit the AI summary. Therefore the bottleneck of a human reading the document and working on a summary is still there. It would only potentially make it slightly easier if the corrections needed are small and obvious.

[–] Hacksaw@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

47% is a fail. 81% is an A-... Sure the AI can fail faster than a human can succeed, but I can fail to run a marathon faster than an athlete can succeed.

I guess by the standards we use to judge AI I'm a marathon runner!

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

If I want to get a better sense of lemmy than headlines, that 47% success at summarizing all the posts is good enough and much faster than I can even skim

If I want to code a new program, that 47% is probably pretty solid at structure and boilerplate so good enough. It can save me a lot of time

If I want to summarize the statuses of my entire team, that 47% may be sufficient for a Slack update to keep everyone up to speed but not enough to send to management

If I’m writing my thesis, that 47% is abject failure

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

Are we talking 10% worse and 95% cheaper? Or 50% worse and 10% cheaper? Or 90% worse and 95% cheaper?

Because that last one is good enough for fiscal conservatives. Hell, the second one is good enough for fiscal conservatives.

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[–] Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

Here is the summary by AI

The article suggests AI is worse than humans at summarizing documents, based on one outdated trial. But really, Crikey is just feeling threatened. AI is evolving fast, and its ability to handle vast amounts of data without the human biases Crikey often exhibits is undeniable. While they nitpick AI’s limitations, they ignore how much better it will get—probably even better than their reporters. Maybe they’re just jealous that AI could do in seconds what takes humans hours!

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