What is the ten worst advise AI has given to an engineering question 1

[KevinNZ]

Just for interest I posted this question to a number of AI engines

"What is the ten worst advise AI has given to an engineering question."

Got back good examples and some genic responses on why AI makes mistakes and should not relied on.

Rather that post the responses here you can try it too.

 

[drawoh]

I was looking for recommended screw torques for some electronics devices, and Google threw up its AI summary. Would you put your reputation on the line by relying on Google AI?

 

[drawoh]

I have been testing ChatGPT by asking about "bristol centaurus engine". Typically, I got a response usually correctly describing the engine as a radial, quoting the wrong displacement and horsepower, listing aircraft that used it that generally did not, and mentioning nothing about its sleeve valves.

On recent attempts, I have gotten a nicely formatted article with correct information, complete with bulleted lists.

Question: Have I "trained" ChatGPT to tell us about Bristol Centaurus engines, or has a human noticed my activity, and online postings about it, and researched and written a nice article?

 

[MintJulep]

I asked Google Gemini "What's the difference between advice and advise?"

The difference between "advice" and "advise" comes down to their part of speech and pronunciation:

Advice (with a 'c') is a noun. It refers to an opinion or suggestion offered as a guide to action.


Pronunciation: It has an "s" sound at the end (like "ice").

Example: "She gave me some good advice." (Here, "advice" is the thing that was given.)

Note: "Advice" is an uncountable noun. You can't say "an advice" or "many advices." Instead, you say "a piece of advice" or "some advice."

Advise (with an 's') is a verb. It means to offer an opinion or suggestion, or to give information to someone.

Pronunciation: It has a "z" sound at the end (like "rise" or "advertise").

Example: "I advise you to study hard." (Here, "advise" is the action of giving a suggestion.)

Example: "Please advise me on the best course of action."

In essence, to advise someone is to give them advice.

 

[LOTE]

I get very accurate responses from my trained GPTs on highly complex questions with text based answers (I don't ask a LLM to do math nor do I ask excel to draft me a letter). I wouldn't expect the free version of any general AI software that was trained on all the internet to give me good responses about specific engineering topics. That is what a trained GPT is for, you feed it the complex topics, codes, research papers, etc. and it will give you very accurate answers on those sources you have trained it on.

I know the post was meant to add some humor, but we are beyond the point and laugh phase of this technology. People who are not embracing this technology today will be out of a job in 5 years.

 

[Overseas_Engineer]

How are you all integrating AI into your workflows and processes?

At the moment, I am just using it as a better search engine, and have to cross-check its answers with verified sources anyway.

@LOTE from your response above it seems like the trained GPT is able to provide information you are looking for from the codes and research papers input into it. How reliable has the output been for you, and how significant are the time savings vs having to skim through the docs manually?

 

[LOTE]

@Overseas_Engineer The time savings are pretty significant. Recently I had it draft a letter for me for a field issue and site all relevant codes. It asked me some clarifying questions, then drafted the full letter in the tone I asked it to. This I also used deep research mode for it to search IBC and IRC for this particular scenario. With just 60 seconds of my time to post the prompt (deep research takes a couple minutes of thinking), I had a rough draft for a letter that required less than 5 minutes of tweaking and verifying that would have taken me probably 45 minutes to an hour to do from scratch.

This isn't exactly engineering related, but I have a separate GPT that knows the legal and tax structure of my business. Yesterday, I had it review a contract and recommend modifications. I wouldn't have it draft a contract from scratch, but it's really good at combing through the fine details that I would miss. For instance, it suggested adding a location for mediation and language about digital signatures being acceptable to sign the contract, amongst other things.
I am constantly talking through tax scenarios with it, and I have it trained not to answer "it depends" like most tax professionals, but instead "here is what needs to be true to make this deductible, and here is my opinion on whether it is feasible with your situation." Anything major, I would run by CPA, but sometimes I can't wait the weeks it takes for a response to start implementing something

My company puts out a blog and is active on social media. I will give an idea and bullet points to my assistant, and she will run it through the GPT to create the blog post draft and social media posts around it. The GPT is trained on what not to say for legal purposes (after my assistant posted project photos on social media saying look at this "flawless" structure our customer built...)

 

[Overseas_Engineer]

@LOTE thanks for the detailed reply! It has definitely convinced me to explore AI further, and try a hand at building some custom GPTs

 

[IRstuff]

This I also used deep research mode for it to search IBC and IRC for this particular scenario.

Nor sure about your AI, but others, particularly doing legal research, have hallucinated case law and legal decisions

 

[phamENG]

@LOTE how did you go about setting that up? Any good links to get me started? My attempts to get it to draft letters/reports for me haven't been great. I might try to train one on my catalog of past reports and see how that works out.

 

[LOTE]

Nor sure about your AI, but others, particularly doing legal research, have hallucinated case law and legal decisions

I have the GPT's instruction set to always provide direct links to the referenced code/document, which I verify before finalizing anything. It occasionally hallucinates, but I find when you tell it to provide its source, it hallucinates much less.

 

[LOTE]

@LOTE how did you go about setting that up? Any good links to get me started? My attempts to get it to draft letters/reports for me haven't been great. I might try to train one on my catalog of past reports and see how that works out.

There are some YouTube videos out there that I watched when I set my first one up, but I have found trial & error and asking ChatGPT itself to be the best way to figure these out. You can tweak the instructions and sources overtime to improve the results, and even have ChatGPT create the instructions for your GPT for you. I have the ChatGPT Business - Team plan, but I think you can create GPTs with any paid plan. When I am logged in, I have GPTs on the left pane, and after clicking on that, there is a +Create button in the top right.