this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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Artificial Generalized Incompetence

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

They are reciprocal so should be the same as what other nations are charging the US. The formula for them is: tariff for X = X's tariff on US, so no surprise here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 31 minutes ago

The current tariff approach by the republican administration does not include the tariffs on US exports. They are not included in the formula.

[–] [email protected] 90 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, I'm not going to spend time trying to duplicate their results, but it wouldn't even slightly surprise me. Cops have been using ChatGPT to streamline their bullshit cop-lingo incident reports, to the extent that it's caught the notice of lawyers and judges... 100% I believe that the dolts who shit out Trump's tariff rates used it too.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

There's a ton of papers on Google Scholar that still include phases like "Let's delve into..." That show otnwas used not to translate, but for the research itself.

And someone did replicate this, and ChatGPT 4o, o1, Claude and Grok all came up with the same formula for an "easy" way to calculate tariffs.

[–] [email protected] 103 points 19 hours ago (4 children)

How about the outlet checks and finds out?

I did, and I couldn’t get low-temperature Gemini or a local LLM to replicate it, and not all the tariffs seem to be based on the trade deficit ratio, though some suspiciously are.

Sorry, but this is a button of mine, outlets that ask stupidly easy to verify questions but dont even try. No, just cite people on Reddit and Twitter…

[–] [email protected] 21 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

That bothers me too. Get an actual expert source to verify before you publish shit from randos on Twitter and Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 hours ago

"several X users claim", they say for sources. Christ Almighty.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

In this case, it's as simple as "type it into ChatGPT, like the Reddit users did" :/

[–] [email protected] 18 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

"these lazy fucks in the government are using ai to come up with policy"

Also news outlet

"I am too lazy to do the laziest thing I'm angry about, even though it's my literal job"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

"News outlet" is a huge stretch. It's a crypto currency blog pretending to be news.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

But that doesn't confirm or deny that Trumps formula came from ChatGPT, they could both be drawing from some other source.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

You can generally toggle LLM "grounding" features, aka inserting web searches into their context.

Modern LLMs have a information "cutoff" of a few months ago, at the latest, so the base models will have zero awareness of this formula.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

Unless the formula came from something that already existed that both Trumps people and these models are referencing to come up with the same number.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

though some suspiciously are.

Some? A huge portion are. Numerous others have replicated it with visual proof. I agree that the news sites should be verifying it, but NYT did and also documented their proof.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 17 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Appears to be that calculation minimum of 10%

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

Thanks, much appreciated.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Because the article is likely just more GenAI vomit, and an LLM doesn't have any degree of deductive reasoning ability to begin with.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

TBH it's probably human written.

I used to write small articles for a tech news outlet on the side (HardOCP), and the entire site went under well before the AI boom because no one can compete with conveyer belts of of thoughtless SEO garbage, especially when Google promotes it.

Point being, this was a problem well before the rise of LLMs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Are you annoyed that they didn't try to replicate it, or that they're disparaging LLMs?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 16 hours ago

That they didn’t try to replicate it.

[–] [email protected] 138 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

The United States of America. A nation ruled by word salad.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

and a man, who has never had salad in his entire life!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

if he chops up his hamburgers into pieces it counts

[–] [email protected] 17 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

There's lettuce on his Big Mac!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 19 hours ago

Yea but he takes the gross green stuff off because children don't like greens, duh.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

It was deep fried before being placed in the burger

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 12 points 17 hours ago

BUY A TESLER

[–] [email protected] 29 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (3 children)

what if they all come up with that because it has been publicised and they just refer to that because they have nothing else to base the questions about that specific topic on?

I just glanced at it and wouldnt know how something like that is even supposed to be, so I dont really know how unhinged the tariff rate thing is. It wouldnt surprise me if it was based only to whatever happened to be going through the madmans mind at the time.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

The numbers come from an overly simple way to level out trade deficits.

So if I sell you $100 in goods and you sell me $120 dollars in goods, I'm "losing" money, therefore 20% tariff (tax to sell me something). In reality, you're going to increase your prices and sell me $140 worth of the same stuff.

All the AIs did was expand this to a global scale, what's insane to me is that the math adds up. It doesn't take an AI to do this though, some economics undergrad could come up with the same thing. Understanding the underlying methodology shows how it completely lacks nuance or understanding of how the world really works.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

Isn't his weird formula the trade defecit percentage + Tariffs from that country divided by two?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 19 hours ago

Yeah, this makes sense to me. ChatGPT isn't crunching the numbers, looking at conservative ideology, foreign policy goals and media optics before recommending the ideal number for the trump admin to implement. Instead it's just looking for the most widely publicized set of numbers in relation to that query and regurgitating that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

what if they all come up with that because it has been publicised

Then I'd ask who published and where they got their analysis from. Very possible that we've got an AI that's built up a backlog of Harvard Business Studies and CalTech economics models to reach the ideal hypothetical tariff regime. But it's just as likely they're ingesting 4chan reposts of Ron Paul Newsletters and Michael Savage radio transcripts to build up its economic background.

That's sort of the problem with AI. There's no specialist-driven guidance on what data is valuable and what data is crap. No litmus test to separate fact from fiction or serious discussion versus trolling. And these western developed models, in particular, are very bad about including the origins of their graphed logical output (because that would make the process of hashing and graphing more expensive, in a system that's already inelegant and resource intensive).

I just glanced at it and wouldnt know how something like that is even supposed to be, so I dont really know how unhinged the tariff rate thing is.

The problem is less that we don't know how bad the tariff rate is and more that the people designing the policies don't know either. They're fishing for answers in the answer pond, and they don't even know if they've got a fish or a boot at the end of the line.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago

They're fishing for answers in the answer pond,

Except, they've actually dropped their lines in the stupidity toilet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

One would have had to ask the ai about it before all this to know where it might be getting its information from

[–] [email protected] 23 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Did ChatGPT come up with the color of the sky? AI chatbots ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Grok all return the same color for the sky, several X users claim.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Yea but we can all agree on sky color but the numbers Trump posted are questionable at best

[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago

the point is chat GPT is trained on ideas people have already had. it's not inventing Trump's economic theory out of thin air.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

All the search engines search the same internet, find similar text, output it using similar formulas.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 19 hours ago (8 children)

Except these AI systems aren't search engines, and people treating them like they are is really dangerous

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 20 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 19 hours ago

.... and generating AI porn, so much AI porn, it will destroy humanity with so much AI porn

[–] [email protected] 6 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Actually, it was the Palantir Gotham threat model... which has a backend to a private chatgpt model :(

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago

I tried replicating this myself, and got no similar results. It took enough coaxing just to get the model to not specify existing tariffs, then to make it talk about entire nations instead of tariffs on specific sectors, then after that it mostly just did 10, 12, and 25% for most of the answers.

I have no doubt this is possible, but until I see some actual amount of proof, this is entirely hearsay.

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