I have had some fun exploring the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models. I have mostly played with Google's BARD LLM. Questions about social and political issues have consistently produced well articulated responses which seemed well grounded in fact and logic.
With those thoughts in mind I decided to see if BARD might help a friend in getting some idea of what would be a reasonable sale price for a very early Leica 1, Model A camera. Looking at prices on ebay and other sales sources was largely fruitless as prices were all over the map. It was apparent, however, that a camera like hers that is a standard model without a very low serial number could occasionally be found for as little as $550. When I posed the question to BARD I received a sale price estimate in the range of $55,000 to $85,000!
I tried a variety of prompts asking for ranges and averages of prices, but BARD insisted on sticking to estimates that appeared to be in the neighborhood of 100 times beyond reality.
My conclusion at this point is that entrusting decisions about issues of economic importance to Artificial Intelligence can be a very risky business. I don't know if any of the other AI/LLM systems which are currently available might better handle such a task. It is possible that prompts which are more specific and better formed could get more sensible responses even from BARD, but at this point it would take a lot to get me to entrust crucial decisions to any such source.
No comments:
Post a Comment