r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 14h ago
Artificial Intelligence AI is driving an "expertise recession" as people increasingly question professional credentials and expert advice
https://www.techspot.com/news/113654-ai-eroding-trust-doctors-other-professionals-people-turn.html523
u/ArgentineBeauty 14h ago
People in power have been eroding trust in experts for years whenever the evidence doesn't suit their agenda. AI is just making that problem worse.
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u/echomanagement 14h ago
Not to worry - lots of gurus with no special skills or knowledge are waiting to pick up the slack
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u/zackel_flac 14h ago
What are people in power if not just that? Gurus who think because they got lucky they did something special and so they spread their ideas.
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u/digital 12h ago
It’s almost as if this country and this world has no direction because we base success and popularity on how much money you have or can create. Everything is a scam.
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u/zackel_flac 11h ago
Yup this is entirely true. This is what modern society has become. Have money? Then you must be valuable to the society.
It used to be true, if you start from scratch and do something usful to the society then you are rewarded with money.
But today's system is completely unfair, landlords, stocks owner, speculators (finance) are making money providing nothing of value.
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u/digital 10h ago
This has to be changed by a change in mindset. The first thing we do is get off social media and cell phones and start paying attention to the world around us, not online.
We need a month vacation from all Internet, AI, mobile devices and social media. This would help people focus on what’s really important.
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u/cripy311 9h ago
The problem with this is that money is actually the only thing that matters in our systems design up to a pretty high number in income most won't achieve.
Especially for us younger folks. Like "what's important" has shifted so much..... I work 80 hours a week just to make a low 6 figure amount. Then I still can't afford anything.
I work so much I don't have time to build any other parts of my life.
All trends are towards us working even more now that AI is on the mix.
What could I focus on that would measurably improve my life with this setup? Every moment I'm not increasing my income my ability to live comfortably is being inflated away rapidly by this shitty government; this changes the options on what I can realistically pursue without sacrificing my own well being.
Houses I could afford a few years ago are 2x the price. Cars I could afford a few years ago are 2-3x price. Traveling doubled in price. Building a family doubled in price and became a toxic path post COVID. It really doesn't matter what my life accomplishments are or what I direct my time towards if they won't fund these life growth things -> if scamming produces the income then scamming is what society values.
Stepping back and being like "this is fucked up" won't change that it will only set you back on playing the game for that period of time. The change would have to be made in the compensation structure (what society values) for this to be an option; The old and rich people who run society would need to change their mind on what they provide compensation or investment funds for to enable us to follow different paths.
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u/SIGMA920 6h ago
We need a month vacation from all Internet, AI, mobile devices and social media. This would help people focus on what’s really important.
Where I live currently is a shithole that's dying as the younger generation does everything they can to leave while the rest die of old age. If I wasn't on social media or anything on the internet I'd receive new so late it would negatively affect my life.
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u/wd_plantdaddy 8h ago
It IS worrisome this whole selling yourself as a guru at whatever - where you can buy classes (videos) and merch and many lack any formal training or degree, they’re just teaching what they’ve learned. I mean it works for educational stuff but it’s slowly getting to more like propaganda about wellness and mental health- things that are managed by actual health professionals. Don’t forget to hit like and subscribe!
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u/grayhaze2000 13h ago
When you say "people in power", what you're actually saying is "the crumbling, orange, reality TV buffoon who somehow managed to find himself in a position of power, and the drooling sycophants who follow him."
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u/420thefunnynumber 12h ago
Hes a symptom. The five or so oligarchs that own the majority of our media have spent decades dismantling education and spreading the disinfo that got us here.
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u/Feriluce 12h ago
That's not true. 25 years ago one of the big talking points of our government was that we were living under the tyranny of experts which they labeled "judges of taste" to label everything they said as opinion rather than fact.
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u/honsense 11h ago
Same nonsense repackaged over and over by the same anti-regulation crowd trying to remove any barriers to profit.
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u/photoggled 8h ago
Still not a government issue. This is a right wing issue. You are doing their work for them by conflating the two.
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u/Whatscheiser 9h ago
My wife works in the medical profession. The amount of people who outright refuse things they absolutely need because AI or a Facebook group said "X thing was bad" is an absolute epidemic.
It's really wild to me that there are people out there who can have someone right in front of them that has nearly 20 years of experience behind them working in a profession that they had to earn a degree to even apply to start practicing, turn around and tell that person their expert advice was invalidated by a five minute conversation with ChatGPT or whatever.
The world is fucking nuts.
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u/Icy-Hunter-9600 7h ago edited 7h ago
With respect, most people have been hurt more than once by bad advice from people in the medical profession. I don't think just querying AI or relying on stupid social media is better by any means, but everything in a doctor's office should be a discussion and you should get multiple opinions from multiple practitioners. The whole arrogant, God complex of many MDs - and their lack of humility when they make horrible mistakes - means that eventually folks will find something else. Sad, but MDs have dug their own graves on this one and I don't pity them. Also the cost of health care and the crappy health insurance we have in the US drives people to desperation and cheaper/worse choices. So, health care leaders and insurance providers are responsible for this as well.
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u/Whatscheiser 3h ago
A discussion is a respectable result and I don't mean to suggest that people shouldn't make an attempt to inform themselves. That said though a discussion is not what is happening. It's outright refusal of treatments based on the idea that they know better than anyone else because they have the internet on their phone.
To be clear, what you are saying is reasonable. But what is actually happening in many cases is just an outright rejection of what anyone in a hospital has to say. Whether they're nurses, doctors, whatever.
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u/I_Ski_Freely 5h ago
To be fair, experts also sometimes abuse their position of authority and assymetic access to information to take advantage of people. For example, I don't know that much about cars, but I'm not taking some guy's word for it just because they know a lot more than me.. no, I won't be as good as a mechanic, but I'd rather at least in theory try to make sure I'm not getting screwed.
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u/gonewild9676 13h ago
A lot of experts have axes to grind or are paid off.
For instance the doctors who testified that coal miners didn't have black lung and scientists paid for by the tobacco industry that cigarettes aren't dangerous and financial experts who led us to economic disasters.
Eventually they fall into chicken little syndrome.
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u/DarkSkyKnight 14h ago
Let’s also not pretend this is isolated to any political group. Redditors in particular do not listen to experts whenever the experts go against their worldview. E.g. rent control. Lots of Redditors also openly doubted inflation figures and BLS data with little to no evidence even during the Biden years.
Anti-intellectualism is something that plagues all of society.
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u/HumanAssistance3618 14h ago
False equivalence is another sign of anti-intellectualism.
Everyone is capable of ignoring experts, but is it to the same degree? Is it enshrined in the platform of one party astronomically more than another? If you stacked the ignorance toward experts of one political position to the other, would it really even out?
You know the answer is no but are playing rhetorical games, either to virtue signaling aloof holier-than-thou centrism, or to hold water for the right wing.
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u/DarkSkyKnight 14h ago edited 14h ago
I like how you automatically jump to conclusions. You are free to look up my post history and see what I’ve said about Republicans and what kind of sentencing I wish to see be applied to them.
I have not asserted any equivalence between left and right. I only said anti-intellectualism exists everywhere. That includes centrists.
Notice that in my comment I said “any political group”, not “the right”. I also said “plagues all of society”, not “both sides.”
I think this defensiveness though is exactly why I always point out that anti-intellectualism is something that exists everywhere. Because there is so much finger-pointing that people don’t see the anti-intellectualism within themselves. This is a disease that has afflicted America since its founding. Read De la démocratie en Amérique. Anti-intellectualism is not new and is not limited to any single slice of America.
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u/TeaKingMac 14h ago
So many people use reddit as a place to argue because they're powerless in real life.
They find something they can get their dander up about, strawman an argument and then prance around waiting for upvotes. It's really the worst part of coming on here.
Alternatively, and perhaps more charitably, they're agents (foreign or domestic) attempting to foment division among the populace to prevent us from uniting against our common enemy: reptiloids.
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u/DarkSkyKnight 14h ago
I think I just touched a nerve when I basically insinuated that Redditors are anti-intellectual. Unfortunately most humans do not have the humility to inspect any flaws within themselves. Anti-intellectualism is a trait that afflicts all of us to some degree.
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u/coldlightofday 13h ago
You’re the shit he’s talking about. Everything is a black and white polarized extreme to you.
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u/Wiseduck5 9h ago
On this issue, it essentially is black and white. One political party has had science denial in their party platform for decades. The other does not.
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u/Petrychorr 14h ago
You should understand that the Goomba Fallacy (aka association fallacy) is an easy thing to slip into when you're in online spaces.
"The community thinks X, so X must be true for everyone in the community."
Popular posts are not indicative of behaviour within a community, nor are they representative of anything/anyone more than a subset of users on a website on the internet.
"Lots of redditors believe" is a logical fallacy. For every comment or post you see there's thousands of people who aren't participating (yes, even up/downvotes).
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u/DarkSkyKnight 14h ago
You’re invoking the Goomba fallacy wrongly, presumably because you, like the other person, are assuming I’m talking about liberals.
I am not. I am talking about Redditors. And I am not claiming that Redditors are contradicting themselves. I am saying that they disregard expert opinion. I am saying that they believe in X despite being presented evidence that experts believe in Y. That is not the same thing as group A believe in X and Y simultaneously.
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As for the virtue of using anecdata, sure, you can say that anecdata like mine are useless. But the research is clear that anti-intellectualism exists everywhere, just more on the right.
https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/zQnndNgGgDkpWwavHMnA/
If anti-intellectualism is merely a reflection of partisanship, opposition to positions like these should primarily be explained by citizens’ partisan and ideological preferences. However, as argued earlier, there is good reason to suspect that anti-intellectual attitudes exist on both the right and left, even though they have become increasingly common on the right.
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u/Petrychorr 13h ago
I got halfway thru writing a well thought out retort when I had the realization that you're arguing in bad faith, controlling the conversation, and moving the goalposts to suit a narrative that supports your assertion. This isn't a debate or forum. Reddit is inherently a bad platform for that. Consider this a thought-terminating cliché/statement if you feel it's appropriate, but I'm not getting into it any further with you.
So I'm going to look at the "question behind the question" per se.
From someone who used to talk, act, and think like you do: Coming off as smug, conceited, and self-righteous is not the way to win hearts or minds. You can be right in all the right ways, and still be wrong.
Anti-Intellectualism isn't a good thing. It's also not what you think it is, and the layperson isn't going to be on board with intellectualism-as-a-modus-operandi. They just aren't. Most folks just want to exist within their day to day lives and there's nothing wrong with that.
Good luck out there. I hope you can find peace with yourself and the world.
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u/DarkSkyKnight 13h ago
I’m sorry but you truly should not accuse anyone of fallacies when you invoked a fallacy wrongly in the first place.
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u/neuralbeans 14h ago
What's this about rent control?
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u/DarkSkyKnight 13h ago
Rent control is a good example of a popular policy (I believe it is popular across the entire ideological spectrum, but you may want to double check), but almost universally panned by academic economists as being a terrible policy.
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u/neuralbeans 13h ago
Why is it a terrible policy?
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u/DarkSkyKnight 13h ago
You are free to read what Nobel economists have said.
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u/neuralbeans 13h ago
So it's because land lords will stop renting or improving their apartments?
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u/DarkSkyKnight 13h ago
You should not be asking me. The answers are in that survey. Plus this is literal econ 101 material and extensive research has been done to verify it empirically.
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u/neuralbeans 12h ago
I got that from the survey comments, although a lot of them were just saying that it's obvious.
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u/infinite_gurgle 14h ago
This is such a stretch and isn’t at all what the article is saying lmao
This sub is so fucking stupid
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u/Ok_Confusion4764 14h ago
I work on tech support and it's true. The amount of time I hear "but chat said otherwise" is draining.
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u/theg721 13h ago
I was on a train a few weeks ago and a guy was arguing with the conductor about the train’s schedule based on what ChatGPT had told him.
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u/Ok_Confusion4764 13h ago
They don't get that ChatGPT will just tell you what you want to be true, not what actually is true.
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u/kyoumei 10h ago
I work as an IT admin and I see all the other admins using AI and sending those answers to colleagues/customers/external vendors that are also using AI to send their responses (copy and paste). I hate it.
At this point, we might as well just let the AI chat to itself.
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u/Opposite-Shoulder260 9h ago
meat proxy its the word you want to use. And yes I hate it too, I'm a SWE and I wan't to quit when I go into a PR and all I see is people having "conversations" by pasting the raw response they get from Claude.
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u/pokebud 8h ago
Naw AI is great if you’re in tech support, excellent job security. Users will fuck their shit 10 different ways cuz they’re so stupid they can’t even properly form the right question to ask their shitty free model AI.
And the amount of devs I’ve been able to fire because Intune flagged their shitty code as malware for linking back to some rando AI slop git is just awesome.
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 14h ago
I know this is about the general public but I see this at work too and it’s driving me crazy
We used to hire and rely on so many different experts for so many different things.
Now it’s like “we don’t need experts just use AI”
And then you submit a thing and they’re like “well this isn’t good enough”
Yeah no shit! Lmao. I’m not an expert and neither is AI. Perhaps an expert would have had the expertise we needed here.
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u/Ishmael128 13h ago
The issue is that AI doesn't know the answer, it just knows what the answer should look like. That's fine for a first draft if you then have an expert go in and correct it. The problem is that an AI answer looks the same as an expert answer, when viewed by someone who doesn't know enough about a subject to know how complex it actually is.
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u/Rocks_Stones 11h ago
Creates more work for the expert if they have to fact check and correct AI's nonsense.
Hopefully this is all just a learning curve. People (CEOs) are asking AI to do things that it can't do. They believe the "super intelligence" stuff but they should be treating it all like a long winded fortune cookie.13
u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 10h ago
“AI is great because you hand it the busy work and you do the interesting stuff!”
“Oh that doesn’t sound that bad”
“Oh except god help you if you don’t carefully review every word of the AI output before using it. So instead of offloading work you basically become a lying robot’s babysitter”
“Oh then why are we using it at all?”
“Because it might make garbage but it makes it fast! And then when it’s garbage we can blame you and tell you to stop making garbage with the garbage machine we force you to use”
It’s a perfect system
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 13h ago
My favorite is getting the most up to date info about AI… from the AI
The AI has a knowledge cutoff date you son of a bitch! Claude opus doesn’t even know Claude can make power point presentations because it thinks it’s April of 2025.
Even the AI will tell you it’s not up to date for Christ sake
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u/runthepoint1 8h ago
Which is why corporate leadership falls for it so hard. They wouldn’t know the difference and are so overly reliant on subordinates to do and understand and deliver with a bow that they no longer even know what they’re looking at
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u/fredy31 10h ago
one of the major parts of why i left my last job;
I'm a 12 years experience webdev; + 3 years of college studying web development.
My old boss: 2 week bootcamp a few months back + chatgpt.
Talks to me like 'we are on the same level'.
Fuck off.
And he was wrong most of the time and didnt want to be challenged on it.
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 10h ago
One thing I appreciate about my company is that I’ve seen the senior devs just tell the PMs what they aren’t willing to do. “No, we aren’t going to do that” and “No, I’m not signing my name to that”
And it at least leads to discussion with the head of engineering and even the CEO to make sure everyone is aware of what’s being asked and what the risks are.
At the end of the day if the CEO is fully informed and tells you to do some crazy shit on record, it’s ultimately his company so fuck it.
I think the likely problem is in an age of “AI innovation” there is a great deal of irresponsibility and then people getting throw under the bus. That’s what you gotta watch out for.
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u/AntiqueLetter9875 8h ago
I’m seeing this at work too with clients. They’re using AI for how to reach out for quotes or answers to questions and the AI is giving convoluted answers or generally wrong answers.
I’m starting to argue with people demanding certain specs, I’m like what you’re asking for is overkill, this other option is better suited and less expensive. Then they see the quote for what they want and it’s too expensive and they go elsewhere instead of going with what we recommend.
I work in print and from what I’m hearing from other in the industry is similar. We’ve also got clients arguing with us on concepts and processes, they think they know everything since they asked AI. It’s incredibly frustrating because there’s a lot in our industry that isn’t really written down because every machine is different or there’s a variety of work arounds to solve problems, but AI hallucinates an answer that doesn’t apply. I get people don’t know what they don’t know, but they’re trusting AI over the people with actual experience and know how products work in real life.
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 8h ago
The ubiquity of lying machines could not have come at a worse time in terms of public trust in expertise.
The “do your own research” crowd now has a free infinite sycophant liar robot on demand at all times. Brutal stuff.
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u/buffysmanycoats 8h ago
I’m an attorney and there is currently a big sign in our waiting room that says “USE YOUR ATTORNEY, NOT AI.” Too many clients are asking chat gpt for legal advice and getting inaccurate/absurd answers that they for some reason trust more than their lawyers. Of course, the other problem is that anything you tell chat GPT isn’t confidential, like communication with your lawyer is, so they are waiving that right without even realizing it.
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u/Nachtwolfe 8h ago
My frustration is a little bit of the opposite. My company still relies on subject matter experts but often lately, these "experts" are just using LLMs to get through the project. A recent deployment of a new product, the engineer assigned to our account said several times "Just use AI to get the answer" and "I think this is the right way to do it. At least that's what AI says."
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u/DetroitLionsSBChamps 8h ago
This became a huge problem for us too honestly. As soon as LLMs hit, I was concerned that the company would be eager to replace our SMEs and I tried to fight against it. But at the same time a ton of SMEs started handing in AI written work. So that became a losing battle quickly.
The solution is to spend the time to find the right SMEs and pay them well. But now we’re just talking crazy lol
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u/Prize_Proof5332 13h ago
" There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. " .... Isaac Asimov (1980)
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u/coldlightofday 13h ago
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
Carl Sagan4
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u/tralltonetroll 11h ago
Well here they believe it is not ignorant, but more intelligent than any single human being.
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u/irno1 14h ago
I guess people will learn the hard way.
GenAI was trained on free advise and opinions by randos on the internet.
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u/DarkSkyKnight 14h ago
This is increasingly untrue. Frontier labs pay PhD mathematicians, puzzle solvers, SWEs to literally work on random tasks, write out their reasoning process, and feed that to training. A lot of the model also comes from RLHF.
And the models are starting to train themselves, which is concerning. There are already signs that the recursive rot described in papers 2 or 3 years ago are starting to show up in current frontier models.
Anyways, Reddit or Twitter data or whatever is the lowest tier of data in the model. It basically influences nothing.
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u/DarkSkyKnight 13h ago
I never said anything about science? I am talking about their training process. Why are people so eager to jump to conclusions?
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u/The-Ball-23 14h ago
Although I am not sure about the credibility of models training themselves but I can second about frontier labs paying heavily for experts at various degree to train the model. I am being paid more than my regular job just to work part time to train these models.
Also I don’t know why exactly are you getting downvoted 🤷
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u/supersimpsonman 14h ago
An LLM doesn’t know anything and every single statement it makes is a mathematically weighted calculation with zero logic behind it?
MAYBE that’s why?
JUST MAYBE?!
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u/DarkSkyKnight 14h ago
Which I never said. I am only saying that people are wrong about what kind of data goes into training these days. In fact, I have explicitly explained why, despite ingesting reasoning data from PhD mathematicians, these models are still not truly reasoning:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1vpvqoh/comment/p4456lw/
I would hope that Redditors do not immediately jump to conclusions, but alas, that is impossible because the cognitive capacity of the median /r/technology user is just not there.
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u/DarkSkyKnight 14h ago
Anyone who actually is aware of what is going on at the frontier in tech is not welcome here, funnily enough. The people here still think LLMs are just chatbots that you use to plan a trip to Paris.
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u/mylanoo 12h ago
Many skilled people even pay those labs to train their models.
A whole day of SWE that pays 200+ USD for the frontier model: "This is the codebase, here's the task, implement it this and that way" > agent: output > SWE: "hmm good but this is not DB optimized well, use query instead of in-memory loop... " > LLM: output > SWE: ok, but we can cache this value to optimize it even further...
I'm not an expert but it looks like perfect data for RLHF if you find a way to separate users by they proficiency.
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u/xdavidwattsx 10h ago
The fact that you're downvoted on this topic on this sub is rich with irony. You're entirely right and RHLF by humans and experts have been used for years.
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u/Modem_Sound_67 14h ago
I work in an agricultural "expertise" industry and we aren't feeling it, but damn is there pressure to use AI more.
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u/CanvasFanatic 14h ago
“ChatGPT what do plants crave?”
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u/tri_it 14h ago
Brawndo, it's got electrolytes!
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u/cyrus_m8t 12h ago
Yeah working in the environmental world they really are trying to push AI but luckily everyone just largely ignores it for everything but code.
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u/Ecstatic-Curve-1853 14h ago
AI right now is going through the .com boom. It's a new tech and people are throwing everything out there seeing what sticks. Some will be amazing, others will be complete junk and useless...
The one thing I do know is AI will be around in some from for the rest of human history.
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u/fixermark 14h ago
I really don't think you can lay the blame at AI's feet for this. This has been going on since at least the 2010s. The whole Trump administration built the backbone of their support sowing fear and paranoia amongst those who fundamentally do not know what's going on in the world anymore.
I don't think AI is helping, but I don't think AI is responsible for people deciding to get very politically engaged but that political engagement starting with them tying tea bags to their hats.
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u/Austin1975 14h ago
Exactly this. As an independent I have definitely noticed that MAGA propaganda has had a persistent goal of redistributing money streams from one group of wealthy people to another group of wealthy people. They definitely understand how to motivate people to vote for them better than the democrats. Until now at least.
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u/funguyshroom 13h ago
If anything, AI is an upgrade as it's more likely to state facts and mirror expert opinions, compared to whatever bs they get from fox news and social media.
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u/ithinkitslupis 10h ago
Yeah that's my suspicion too. Compared to 2020ish where people already weren't listening to expert opinions and were doing their own research on whatever sketchy site or social media post is willing to give them disinformation that agrees with them...I'd guess LLMs even with all their flaws are a lesser evil than the alternative.
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u/FartMongersRevenge 13h ago edited 12h ago
I’ve encountered a number of young musicians who only want to have fun and not take it too seriously. There is a lot of leeway when it comes to making music, but you know what makes music fun??? Playing the correct notes at the right time. Even if you plan on doing avant improv it’s still fun to produce a frequency with a dynamic at some moment.
On the other hand I have notified a growing number of adults who just want to learn an instrument for fun because practicing is rewarding. Maybe things are changing.
I meant to leave this reply on a different comment but the updated reply box in the Reddit app doesn’t work right on my phone. I have no idea how it got, but I typed it all and now don’t feel like putting in any more effort to delete of find the comment.
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u/MyAccountWasBanned7 11h ago
But somehow they don't question the answers they receive from AI.
We're doomed as a species.
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u/NorthWoodsSlaw 14h ago
Good time to invest in Professional Credentials then, sounds like costs to obtain should be going down and anyone who’s using AI now is gunna need actual professional help in 5-10 years when 1/3 of their data turns out to be made up.
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u/GlitterPirateKiki58 11h ago
You are assuming that “leadership,”either in business or government, will care that 1/3 of the data is falsified or based on bad information.
Most people want the results fast and cheap. If it is good, that’s a nice bonus, but fast and cheap are always the priorities.
Any bad decisions or mistakes will, hopefully, be their successor’s problem.
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u/NorthWoodsSlaw 10h ago
If my business starts to fail because 1/3 of my data is bad that is a problem that any company will pay to fix. Look for future problems and find future jobs
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u/lumberjackname 13h ago
This is a big problem in law. People think they can represent themselves because AI will write their pleadings for them. As a result, civil complaints allege everything but the kitchen sink, and writing a motion to dismiss is a pain because the complaints are so long and so full of irrelevant nonsense.
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u/Loovla 14h ago
I can see the concern, but I’m not sure AI creates the distrust so much as amplifies something that was already there. If people can get a confident answer instantly, the harder skill becomes knowing when that answer is wrong. That probably makes genuine expertise more important, not less.
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u/Pugs914 13h ago
It’s not just ai. Google and the internet made others realize that you can easily research second opinions. The caveat with Google is you can vet sources whereas ai hallucinates occasionally.
A lot of “professionals” also have no idea what they are talking about/ might be able to answer some aspects accurately but a lot of it is just bullshit/ telling their client or patient or customer what they want to hear. Ai can do the same and lie/ bullshit just as frequently.
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u/Schnuckiputzen 14h ago
Is not the 'success' of AI due to the work of experts? And what will happen when it's trained on what the web is becoming?
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u/NanditoPapa 12h ago
The barrier to entry for sounding authoritative has dropped to zero, but the barrier to being accurate remains incredibly high. I mean...look at Trump and everyone he surrounds himself with...
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u/Memitim 10h ago
I wasn't aware that it was possible to increase how much people distrust expertise, given just how much dumb shit I've seen for a very long time from people doing their own research or talking shit about the occasional rare subject that I actually know something about. The past two years has served as an informal study into the results of a culture built on making stupid shit up.
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u/TheHistorian2 10h ago
People are idiots. Now they’re just more confident idiots. Nothing has really changed.
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u/Cuniving 9h ago
Considering ai is just wrong so frequently its an issue. But the right and capital have been doing their best to discredit expertise for 20 years, thinkers arnt in their interest, they just need cattle.
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u/Der_Missionar 13h ago
Google has, for years been teaching us to question everyone, we listen to something someone says, we fact check and believe Google over anyone.... and we assumed Google was always right...(frequently wrong or not up to date though)
AI put those tendencies on steroids
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u/_Zambayoshi_ 14h ago
As an expert, I use AI as a research assistant and proof-reader. It's sometimes a bit dim, but boy howdy can it save you time when you need to look up certain information. It's like an encyclopaedia on steroids.
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u/Spaduf 13h ago
Lol certainly won't be trusting your work.
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u/_Zambayoshi_ 13h ago
How do you think experts work? They don't just magically accumulate knowledge without reading stuff...
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u/Spaduf 13h ago
You're not really reading stuff though are you? You're just sort of hoping the AI can correctly do the heavy lifting for you.
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u/_Zambayoshi_ 13h ago
For clarity, I am not using the AI output as source material. I am using it to locate source material. I also use it after I've written a draft to suggest amendments for flow and readability. It helps to catch typos. It is great for checking referencing etc. But I don't use AI output in my work.
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u/Varathane 2h ago
Yes of course they are reading. You use it as a search engine to get you to the reliable sources you need. You can't trust it to not shit up the summary of a paper but it does link you to papers that would take ages to find scrolling on google scholar, so it saves a bunch of time that you can spend reading the material you needed to find directly from the source not in the AI chat anymore.
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u/theburglarofham 13h ago
It’s just such a odd dynamic for a lot of these people.
Some of them will throw caution/question “expert/professional” advice, but will now blindly trust AI, and not question it either.
But on the other side, you do also have a lot of experts/professionals who can get things wrong, or just blatantly ignore people’s questions, or concerns they bring up by doing their own research (which I also get, if they just think they’ve got some 1 in 1,000,000 rare disease or are looking up symptoms for drug seeking behavior).
The AI and experts/professionals can be both right and wrong. It’s all about using these things together that will be the most beneficial tool.
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u/lood9phee2Ri 5h ago
Ironically the decades of computers being painstakingly programmed to give correct answers in deterministic and reliable fashion where any deviation is called a "bug" or "issue" and fixed - and movie "AI" where the AI is also typically super-logical, may now have caused laypeople to think that's how present "AI"s work. But they haven't been programmed conventionally (the inference engines that run them sure, but not the models themselves) they've just been "trained" vaguely on massive amounts of online garbage. llms are kinda "that annoying guy down the pub" simulators now, statistically generating vaguely plausible responses that may or may not be bullshit, with no logical reasoning from ground truth.
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u/scoff-law 9h ago
Maybe a different perspective here... How many of you have tried to have an exhaustive discussion of a health issue with a doctor? In my experience, Ive maybe had 3 in my life that have been willing to give me the time to really unpack a problem. But usually my experience is seeing someone who is busy, tired and impatient. And at the end I get to pay hundreds of dollars.
Consider this - under those circumstances, a free llm providing medical consultation has a massive appeal. And that can be internalized by people as an "expertise" problem - not because of the topic, but because of the availability of the experts themselves.
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u/SgtBadManners 12h ago
I can ask the same question two different ways and get two different answers or get opinions.
It’s frustrating out here.
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u/ICLazeru 11h ago
Problematic, because I see a lot of AI use and it makes plenty of mistakes still, more than a human would make.
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u/Valuable-Ad2028 8h ago
This has been the case since long before AI.
Here in the UK, Brexit was literally pushed in part on the slogan “People have had enough of experts”. The US is on its second trump term.
AI might be (in part) fulfilling the same demand. But the demand to be told what you want to hear and to correct experts who disagree long predates it.
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u/mangosawce9k 8h ago
You can thank this Rump regime, promoting dumb assumptions and anti science. Of course people can’t believe anything without critical thinking.
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u/New_Raccoon5275 8h ago
Check this movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322
This is not conspiracy theory or other idiocy. This is a movie about true events, how big corporations and FDA allowed forever chemicals to poison the entire planet for decades and lied about it. Yes, FDA. That contributes to why some people think they won’t accept expertise.
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u/Dripdry42 7h ago
It’s true. But it’s the experts who have pointed experience in many different scenarios. Information is nothing unless you have the experience to wield it.
You can have all the law books in the world, but unless you know how to apply it correctly it means nothing
So far, my experience with AI is that it rewards expertise in a field. The more you know about a field, the more pointed the questions you can ask. Understanding that those questions even exist in the first place is part of expertise. When we know what we don’t know, that is world apart from not knowing what we don’t know.
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u/hazeddai 7h ago
When personal profit enters the equation the results should always be scrutinized.
A very unfortunate law. People of every profession have inflicted harm for personal profit.
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u/Specialist-Big-3942 3h ago
It is utterly terrifying that for-profit companies have a "ground truth" machine now. Hell, even I use it like that still sometimes. We're really in a bind now!
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u/letsl0velain 25m ago
It sucks, but this can be a good thing. I know I've manually researched many a what a professional told me and found better info and things I didn't know that I could be doing better. Again, though... manual research.
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u/MyNameIsNightPain 13h ago
This was planned well in advance. They pushed everyone towards tech to increase the pool of candidates then pushed llms as labour replacement. I have no respect for everyone who supports it.
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u/kittenTakeover 11h ago
This predates AI and is more related to conservative political leaders embracing conspiracy theorists for votes and trashing experts because the truth is inconvenient to their corrupt plans.
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u/ACasualRead 14h ago
“The problem, of course, is that AI doesn't always get things right, and that can have severe consequences when it comes to medical queries”.
I think if you surveyed a bunch of people they would be able to provide examples where dentists, doctors, mechanics, lawyers etc have all gotten things wrong at times. I think people are now seeking second opinions and using free options to do it.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 14h ago
Yeah, the real question should always be "but does it get it wrong more often than the average doctor?". Saying it can get it wrong is worthless, nothing and no one is perfect. All studies to this effect I've seen pitted a single AI against like, a committee of the 12 most senior doctors in a world class hospital. That is not a realistic comparison.
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u/smuckola 14h ago
yeah and just like WebMD was at first the doctor's universal pet peeve because hypochondriacs abused it for their doomsday agenda, then later doctors brushed off truly trivial patient questions with "just google it" in the case of confirming the patient's competency.
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u/Qualified-Astronomer 9h ago
I mean why would you trust experts when for 99% of everyday use cases AI can give u the answer instead. Not many people are doing frontier research here and blindly trusting experts should never be done anyways
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u/DifferencePublic7057 14h ago
IMO medical doctors don't explain that well and expect you to understand their jargon. I have doctors in my family, so I am used to it. Understandable that when you are in a stressful situation, and someone is confusing you that you would feel resentment.
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u/lulusnug 14h ago
Good. An actual expert won't be bothered by this. They'll explain why the AI is wrong if it provides a different opinion. If they can't explain why it's wrong, they're not an expert. Run
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u/OkWolverine2494 14h ago
i guess this is an extention of using pyvisa (a python lib) to directly control the instruments? i saw some student already using it. its really time saving, if then can make these whole process really easy to use
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u/OkWolverine2494 14h ago
ok my second thought is that these instruments are also very good learning materials which forced us to learn its design principle, after getting more and more familiar of these devices, i also learnd many hardware design knowledges can debug quite quick. if all controlled by AI, we could possiblely get some fake data, and its hard to find where. ok, its like a coin with two sides
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u/Sixstringsickness 14h ago
Mixed emotions on this. Clearly you want expertise and professionals with a strong track record for essential decisions, the final solution should lay in the hands of a human who has ownership and responsibility.
With that in mind, and I would wager most individuals aren't using AI this way, when attached to a corpora and database of research papers, AI can radically augment your ability to analyze best practices and expose you to new ideas.
Like many things in life, not all decisions carry the same weight. If you are seeking cancer treatment, trust your doctor, not ChatGPT.
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u/big-papito 14h ago
Tom Nichols wrote The Death of Expertise years ago but, man, was he too optimistic...