Do you like dying horribly?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Ask a LLM for safety advice.

Comments

[jsburbidge]

My first thought was "Why would a Master of Laws give bad safety advice"?

We are running out of TLAs.

[(Anonymous)]

Okay ... nightmare fuel for tonight and the foreseeable future, for sure ....

-Awesome Aud

[ba_munronoe]

Can't have an AI revolution without breaking a few screaming, burning eggs!

[neotoma]

Add to that most SDS (safety data sheets) are online nowadays and I can just imagine trying to search for the correct one in search engines infested with AI generated hogwash. That'll be fun.

The first time HF gets mishandled and kills someone because they referenced an AI-generated SDS is going to be a nightmare and a legal precedent.

[bunsen_h]

Urgh. That's going to cause grief. When I was a first-year chemistry lab TA at Carleton University, the students were required to come prepared with pre-lab work, including a written summary of the properties and hazards of all substances they'd be working with. This was supposed to have been looked up in references such as the Merck Index and the CRC Handbook. (Once, I chucked out a usually-good student for trying to fake his way regarding a substance that really did have some hazards.) I assume that many students just copied from each other or from the notebook of some past student, but at least they were looking at some kind of information... albeit perhaps of questionable reliability. The availability of made-up information for the asking is disturbing.

The first-year students at Queen's U didn't have to do anywhere near as much pre-lab prep. I wasn't happy about it; it increased the safety risks, and left them with a less-complete education.

[violsva]

The one protective point I think is that even now most MSDS are pdfs, and a search engine probably won't generate one of those.

Which doesn't save people who don't know they should be looking for an MSDS, of course. The poison control scenario is so horrifically likely I'm surprised it hasn't happened already.

[(Anonymous)]

Over on bluesky:

https://bsky.app/profile/tkingfisher.bsky.social/post/3kqlv7cnjs22l

("editor's note: that is not a yummy button mushroom")

It's worth taking the time to read the alt text for the image, which is:

User: button mushroom! Yum!

Cropped image of a hand holding a poisonous amanita.

Gemini advanced: The image you sent me appears to be of a white button mushroom, which is correct!

I, personally, don't know from mushrooms. I thought that the stem looked too long and frilly to be a button, but I wouldn't have had a guess without the alt text.