[nhlx2]

On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. — Charles Babbage

[astrange]

That's just autocorrect. (Or generative AI.)

[adrian_b]

Except that autocorrect is frequently wrong, so that many authors of hilariously wrong messages have to apologize that the messages must have been messed by autocorrect (which may be true or not).

When autocorrect is wrong, it usually is because it chooses words believed to be used more frequently in that context, so especially the authors of scientific or technical texts are affected by the wrong guesses of autocorrect, because they use less common words.

[TeMPOraL]

Or error correction. Or statistical analysis.

"Right" and "wrong" aren't binary states. In many cases, if the data is at least in small part correct, that small part can be used to improve correctness in an automated way.

[kylebenzle]

So well put!

People think they understand what "AI" is supposed to do, then "AI" turns out to not do what they expect and they call it broken.

[TeMPOraL]

Honestly, I always thought this is a perfectly legitimate question, and it's Babbage that's failing to comprehend it, or being obtuse for show.

[bobbylarrybobby]

Maybe I am failing to comprehend it. But to me the question reads “is your analytical engine, which you've described as a merely a mechanical calculator, also psychic or otherwise magical, so that it may subvert its own mechanical design in order to produce the answer I want instead of what I asked for?”.

[darepublic]

I understood it as "if I entered 1+2 but actually I had meant 2+2 will the machine correctly give me 4 despite my error?"

[tomtom1337]

I guess the unspoken assumption Babbage makes here is «if I put only the wrong figures into the machine». Then it is completely unreasonable to expect correct output. In ML context an LLM has been trained on much data, some «wrong» and some (hopefully more) «correct», which is why asking something incorrectly can still give you the correct answer.

[chipsrafferty]

Can you help me understand the question (and context)?

Life the "machine" is a calculator, and I want to ask 5+5, but I put in the "wrong figures" e.g. (4+4), is the "right answer" 8 or 10? Is the right answer the answer you want to the question you want to ask, or the answer to the question you actually asked?