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AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds (www.crikey.com.au)

submitted 2 months ago by Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found.

Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry. The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a questions on notice at the Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence.

The test involved testing generative AI models before selecting one to ingest five submissions from a parliamentary inquiry into audit and consultancy firms. The most promising model, Meta’s open source model Llama2-70B, was prompted to summarise the submissions with a focus on ASIC mentions, recommendations, references to more regulation, and to include the page references and context.

Ten ASIC staff, of varying levels of seniority, were also given the same task with similar prompts. Then, a group of reviewers blindly assessed the summaries produced by both humans and AI for coherency, length, ASIC references, regulation references and for identifying recommendations. They were unaware that this exercise involved AI at all.

These reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47%.

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[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 26 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Ten ASIC staff, of varying levels of seniority, were also given the same task with similar prompts.

This is the key line here. These are likely university educated staff with significant experience in writing and summarising information and they were specifically tasked with this. However, within the social media landscape (Lemmy, reddit, etc) AI is already better at summarising information than humans because most human social media users are fucking retarded and spend their time either a) not reading properly/at all or b) cherrypicking information to fit whatever flavour of impassioned narrative they are trying to sell to everyone else.

Just some very recent examples I've seen of Lemmy users proving they are completely incapable of parsing relevant information are that article about an alternative, universal and non-proprietary database called GetGee which everyone seemed to think was an article about whether TikTok should be banned (because the word TikTok was in the title and that tricked their monkey brains) or the update to the 404 Media story on "active listening" in which people responded as if this technology exists and is in use when 404 Media still haven't been able to confirm either of these things. The second one was particularly egregious because it got picked up by all kinds of tech-related YouTube channels and news sites and regurgitated by their viewers and readers without a single one of these people ever bothering to read the source material properly.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 months ago

Lemmy users proving they are completely incapable of parsing relevant information

To be fair, you need to actually read the article to be able to summarize it.

[–] SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 months ago

I had the same thought. Most people I encounter online and in person are not great at summarizing information regardless of the context.

For example: those who don't summarize the content of a conversation and instead poorly and inaccurately act out the entire encounter, "word by word ". Ughhhhh.