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I Asked AI to Count My Carbs 27,000 Times. It Couldn’t Give Me the Same Answer Twice.
(www.diabettech.com)
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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Technology
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OK I wonder if there's something wrong with the photo.
The photo:
WTF!!??
That's like estimating the carbs in 2 slices of standard sandwich bread! Of course not all bread has the same amount of sugar, but a reasonable range based on an average should be a dead easy answer.
I thought the headline sounded crazy, but try to read the article, and it actually becomes worse. I have said it many times before, these AI chatbots should not be legal, they put lives at risk.
To be fair there's no way of knowing what the filling is, so the AI may be guessing based on that too
Friendly reminder that LLMs don't do math, they guess what number should come next, just like words.
It can probably link the image to the words "a photo of a sandwich on a plate", and interpret the question as "how many calories are in a sandwich" but from there it is just guessing at the syntax of an answer, but not at finding any truth.
It knows sandwiches have calories and those tend to be 3-4 digit numbers, but also all numbers kinda look the same, so what's to say it's not 2, 5, or 12 digits?
Tool-powered agents can do math though. The issue is the fuzziness of it trying to guess carbs. It doesn’t know weight, ingredients, or anything other than a picture. These tools can be useful but not for this. Maybe one day but not yet.
Whoever claims an AI (LLM or agents) can do that and charging their users is lying and defrauding them.
The apps are advertising that they can do this tho. Many of them are aggressively sponsoring YouTubers who advertise you can basically just wave your phone over the food and it takes away all the “work” from traditional calorie counting apps
But the ai assumes itself infallible, at least it could ask...
That's true, it should ask follow-up questions, or at least clarify its assumptions
They put lives at risk the same way every single product at your local home improvement store does. When you misuse a tool for a purpose it wasn't intended and isn't good at, you're going to get bad results.
This is an issue for the educational system, not the legal system.
What if the packaging on every tool at home depot grossly misrepresented its capabilities and/or purpose?
This chainsaw cures cancer? Hot damn somebody call RFK!
Concrete mix goes great with pancakes, etc.
Does OpenAI claim ChatGPT is fit for those purposes? No.
The concrete itself will happily mix into your pancakes.
I think the whole point of this discussion is that the various peddlers of AI in fact do make wild claims about their capability.
My observation is that largely it's the downstream AI consumers who repackage it irresponsibly. That said, I don't hang on the words of Sam Altman and it's certain they are pushing the idea that AI is more capable than it is, but mostly what I see is them saying they built this thing and it does neat stuff and it can probably do neat stuff for you, use your imagination.
I believe a lot of the folks developing these tools would be horrified at the irresponsible ways vendors and end users are using it.
As others have pointed out, this is also a problem with how they are advertising it.
If duct tape was advertised as something that you can use to hold your roof beams together, you'd have a issue with that.
And at the same time I wouldn't say "hey fuck that, duct tape is terrible! It doesn't hold beams together, I can't use it to tow a trailer, it's all just pretending to stick paper together because really every sliver of duct tape just sticks to the previous piece, etc etc" But that's the cool thing we do on Lemmy.
The ad is bad, duct tape ain't bad.
I have not seen OpenAI advertise ChatGPT as capable of medical diagnosis or therapy or anything like that. If you want therapy, and you can't afford better — because I think we can agree that AI is terrible at it, then there should be a therapy app with explicit safety controls.
The problem is someone created a screwdriver which is handy for lots of screwdriver shaped purposes and someone is trying to carve a ham.