Can you melt eggs? Quora’s AI says “yes,” and Google is sharing the result

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 475 points –
arstechnica.com

Incorrect AI-generated answers are forming a feedback loop of misinformation online.

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Speed running our way to “electrolytes, it’s what plants crave!” I see … if you know, you know.

President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho did seem more entertaining at least then the circus we’ve had for the last few years. At least we can look forward to that?

Plus Ow! My balls! Does seem like some good tv.

He was a great president. Saw a problem, admitted his ignorance to it, and hired the smartest person he could find to fix it.

Our timeline is far worse.

A benevolent idiot is better than a malicious ignorant.

True, but given his cabinet, is 1 out of 6 that great in selecting?

They can't all be like the attorney general.

Hiring special needs, women and letting members of the public rise above their station to become one of the cabinet?

Sure it's literally for all the wrong reasons but honestly doesn't seem any different than now and with less institutional corruption... so... maybe???

Nepotism, as I think the secretary of education was his step brother? So still a little corrupt.

Yeah he's a little bit stupid but he's pretty good.

But how do you know they weren't the best there was? It was bad times you know.

Quora

well, there is the problem

Festering pit of misinformation it is. And yes, they’ll ban you for calling it out or correcting the record.

i tried to deliberately get a ban there after they refused to delete my account ant i just couldn't

I… don’t think they can refuse to delete your account. You could straight up file a GDPR request.

yeah gdpr should probably work... the official deletion flow is broken for me

You can melt anything. An egg will burn first. Then you will get some type of rendered carbon ash. Which will, eventually, melt and/or vaporize with enough heat.

Melting is a physical process that changes the form and aggregation state of a thing, but it still remains that thing. Melted gold is still gold, for example.

Burning on the other hand is a chemical process that leads to new "things". The egg isn't longer an egg.

You're comparing an element to a hyper complex concept (not even a structure).

Water isn't an element, but it still adheres to these rules.

I would argue that it's no longer 'egg' once it's carbon ash and therefore never melted before it's existence ended.

Which came first, the egg or the time dilation of carbon atoms?

Well, for eggs, that are carbon based, you will in fact have problems since carbon doesn't have a liquid state at regular atmospheric pressure. I guess you can add pressure, but is that really what we mean when asking a question if something melt?

If I simply ask "can eggs melt" and the answer is complicated but still yes, I would hope it to explain the complications and not just say yes. But I mean, if I just wanted a yes or no answer, and it's technically correct, I'm cool with that. I could always follow up with "how" if the simple answer doesn't satisfy me.

Well, I agree. But what I mean is that when people ask physics questions, it is often implicitly understood to mean under current conditions. You rarely hear normal people or kids (who I find asks most of the physics question) include anything about frictionless vacuums in the question. (For reference: https://xkcd.com/669/ ). So, for the egg question, regular people would most likely consider the answer to be "No, except under very special circumstances". But, I agree with you that if a simple Yes/No answer is expected, it have to be Yes.

Wouldn't that be true for everything then? 3,400C is pretty special circumstances in my book, yet we say tungsten melts.

I don't think adding heat is a special circumstance like adding pressure is. It's very easy to add heat to something. Adding pressure means building a sealed environment to enclose it's, and some specialized equipment to increase the pressure.

Adding heat requires that you burn something. That's it.

Yes, you have a point. However adding heat is often implicit when talking about melting stuff. However, if it requires 3400C, then the answer would probably include a comment about that.

Eggs are primarily comprised of colloidal suspension.

Colloids cannot melt, as they are not in a solid phase

Which raises an interesting question: what if you cooked it in a zero oxygen environment (say argon, nitrogen, or carbon dioxide... basically welding gases because they're mostly inert). I can't burn in that context, so does it melt? Or do you drive off all the volatiles and are just left with carbon anyway?

If you heat carbon based stuff without oxygen a process called pyrolysis happens. It separates the components into their molecules and molecules into smaller molecules with less weight. During this process you can gain different materials.

Not sure what kind of products are possible with the pyrolysis of egg + welding gases though lol

If you heat carbon in a vacuum (via radiation) you can get melted carbon!

If you heat carbon in a vacuum, it sublimates straight to gas. If you heat it under extreme pressure in an inert gas atmosphere, then it can melt. Unfortunately creating such pressures in the lab is only possible with diamond anvil presses, which are themselves carbon and thus tend to sublimate from the heat, resulting in pressure vessel failure. Doing the experiment on the surface of a neutron star would work, but presents some other difficulties.

In an inert atmosphere under enough pressure pretty much anything can melt without burning.

This is the correct answer. In a vaccum wood won't burn for instance. It will melt, and even sublimate.

An egg is already liquid, so it can't be molten. It's the same way you can't melt water.

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well it's referencing this article now

Somebody needs to write an article about that article that states the opposite

Doesn't everything technically have a melting point?

Yep, also id argue eggs are 'melted' by default, but if you froze and the reheated the egg it would then melt.

can't wait till more LLMs and content generators get trained on this garbage data and repeat it all over the internet ad inifinitum.

Had a friend open a conversation line by referencing something on Quora and I immediately tuned out. Quora is a wealth of nonsense.

When my daughter was 7 or 8 years old, I caught her answering questions on quora on topics that she knew nothing about. Something to keep in mind.

She's probably more knowledgeable than their average user.

She was answering questions about ear piercings which she’d never had, but yes you’re probably right!

Even when Quora isn't being ruined with AI, it's flooded with Neo-Nazis that are self-proclaimed historians.

Wtf kind of quora are you reading to find neo Nazi shit? I just find people shilling crypto and bad tech advice.

I read a lot of world war two history, so search engines naturally shove such parts of Quora at me. Some are more subtle about being Neo-Nazis, but are defintely pushing the agenda.

I do sometimes “provide feedback” on terrible featured snippets, but goddamn does it feel like shouting into a void.

Ublacklist Firefox plugin.

Add quota Add pinterest

Make the internet a little less shit

You can find some blacklist subs on GitHub too if you want to blanket filter out a lot of the other shit (like alternative.to and other bulk targeted result sites)

I mean at sufficient temperature that is possible, you can melt Carbon stuff.

Who knew the Abominable Intelligence is actually really, really dumb.

From my tests LLMs are only good at writing boring work emails, you should pretty much never trust any factual information they generate without verification.

They're amazing for so many things, coding and discovery especially - yes you need to verify answers but you were supposed to do that with Wikipedia and everything else anyway.