Paediatricians are somewhat frequently^ the victim of idiot attackers who think they are (based on the prefix of that job) paedophiles.
LLMs giving confidently incorrect information like this is so much worse, takes much less of an idiot to take it at face value, and if so minded to attack the innocent journalist (or anyone similarly associated with the real criminals, as the article points out).
(^I mean, relative to the incidence of paedophilia in the field, or certainly to attacks on other professions based on misguided assumptions; far too frequently, several occurrences in the last 24 years it seems (I was initially just wanting to check details on the one case I dimly recalled), but not like it's happening every week.)
I’ve never heard of a pediatrician being read as a pedophile. Is this somehow specific to the UK spelling or UK culture?
There are cases where I’ve noticed British English speakers use truncated forms where Americans don’t. Like “uni” for university, or “veg” - is it the case that paediatricians/pediatricians are referred to as paedos/pedos and that causes ambiguity? That would be unfortunate.
No it's just barely literate idiot thugs. They're not pronounced or spelt any more similarly than in AmE or anything. It's just 'oh paediatrician that's what paedo is short for innit'.
(there might be some overlap there, I haven't actually read more than necessary to check they're not cases of the paediatrician actually being a paedophile too, there is some of that unfortunately)
Once upon a time I bought a cheap pedometer. After a while I grew curious about how it actually worked. Some internet searching failed to turn up anything. A couple days later, while at work, it suddenly occurred to me that there were probably pedometer nerds and enthusiasts and they probably have web forums that could tell me how it worked.
I'm usually a silent thinking but sometimes when I have a sudden idea I'll say it out loud. This was one of those occasions and I started to say "I need to find some pedophile forums!". Fortunately about halfway through I realized that pedophile is not the correct word for "pedometer enthusiast" and managed to not complete the sentence.
It turns out that the "pedo" in "pedophile" and the "pedo" in "pedometer" are completely unrelated.
In "pedometer" it is not the prefix "pedo" attached to meter. It is "ped" connected to "meter" with "o", similar to the way the "o" is used in "speedometer". The "ped" is a shortening of the Latin "pedis". It came to English via the French pédomètre.
The "pedo" in "pedophile" comes from Greek paidos which means "child".
I have no idea what the actual word for "pedometer enthusiast" is. For that matter I also am not sure what the correct word for a meter that measures children would be.
> LLMs giving confidently incorrect information like this is so much worse
And even in the face of its pervasiveness I see more and more people just accepting their output.
Recently there was a post about using an “LLM” to do sentiment analysis on 600k orange site posts. Without even a modicum of irony.
Both the post and the comments lack any instance of the word “hallucination”, but I’ve seen downvotes being used as a means of silencing a lot here so maybe any dissenting voices were killed off.
LLMs giving confidently incorrect information like this is so much worse, takes much less of an idiot to take it at face value, and if so minded to attack the innocent journalist (or anyone similarly associated with the real criminals, as the article points out).
(^I mean, relative to the incidence of paedophilia in the field, or certainly to attacks on other professions based on misguided assumptions; far too frequently, several occurrences in the last 24 years it seems (I was initially just wanting to check details on the one case I dimly recalled), but not like it's happening every week.)