DO NOT TRUST ANY AI TECHNICAL DRAWING!
DO NOT TRUST ANY AI
TECHNICAL DRAWINGFTFY
There been so much gaslighting I keep thinking I’m missing something as I keep doing the mandatory AI usage from work and largely throwing away the results. Yet I keep repeatedly hear people hush about how great it is.
Last week I finally had something that I thought would be right up it’s alley: a fairly milquetoast program that needed to be ported from one language to another. It generated the ugliest unmaintainable code I could imagine. I went to execute the test suite and it failed every single one. The code was ugly, hard to follow, failed to important a number of sanity checks, kept repeating common code without factoring, making up calls that didn’t exist. In trying to salvage it, I decided to ask it to implement a super simple check that should have been a one liner and it suggested splatting over a hundred lines of code all over the file to randomly mess with imaginary end points for no apparent reason and still falling to just check the length of the array I told it to.
Meanwhile people at my company who don’t even commit any code are writing on internal blogs about how transformative it is, how much it makes their coding better (that they didn’t even do) and executives are commenting their vision and intelligence and promoting them…
I actually tried to get an AI to code a simulation for AI agents. God, it’s so shitty at everything it does, it is only good to torture for entertainment…and to teach Excel apparently, only uses I found for it.
I will say there’s a few common boilerplate things that is easier to express as quick prose and get 4-5 lines out of it, highly predictable lines that I could have probably done myself, a little more convenient when I’m rusty on a language or library. Also code completion, same thing of only good for like 3-5 lines at a time.
Still have to watch it like crazy and carefully fix the mistakes and still throw out what it suggested and it can be pretty annoying, but I’m willing to believe it saved me a smidge of time on those. But anything beyond that and it’s a horrible mess I would never abide that’s more trouble to try to fix than just scrap and start over. It’s hard to stay vigilant and micromanage the details as I’m used to reviewing human code and the sorts of mistakes the LLMs make are distinct from what humans make.
There are a few things it does well, like movie suggestions based on a list of shows you like. And its good at reformatting data you feed it. But It’s crap overall. Often takes more time to correct it, than starting from scratch.
Definitely feel the waste of time trying to salvage junk it generated. At best I might have it take a horrible stab at it and then just look for key bits to Internet search, read documentation, and do it the actual right and maintainable way.
3-5 lines of code or has a decent chance at being usable or needing a minor tweak. More than that and it just sucks.
Also did use it with some messy list to find essentially duplicate things that weren’t exactly duplicate. It wasn’t 100%, with false negatives and positives, but it let me find a lot of them easily and the situation didn’t require me to find every single duplicate.
“Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window” - Steve Wozniak
It was legit a little scary how long I stared at this diagram in utter bewilderment.
It’s 2025 and the tech bros have made it where I can’t believe my own lying eyes.
For people enjoying LLMs being shit at everything, the Vagina Museum has a whole series of them failing at making pictures about pregnancy:
https://masto.ai/@vagina_museum
I think this was the first one:
This won’t kill anybody. It’s not wired to anything but a ground wire.
Maybe the point is rather “It generates random bullshit diagrams and if you rely on them, things will go wrong”. This one might not be lethal, but some other design it produces might.
100%. I was just talking about this one image not AI in general.
I asked llms to help me with world building projects and to make some artwork (technical drawings) and boy howdy did they fail…
This isn’t the outlet, it’s the plug that goes into the outlet. Presuming you had it would fit into (the plugs are oriented wrong), it would be about as safe as shoving a fork in instead.
I understand what it is. But any normal GFCI would trip before it could cause any harm to anything. Even a normal breaker would trip before it created a problem, well other than sparks and likely fire. Since this is covered unlike a bare fork it is moderately safer and would not allow current through the body.
It’s irrelevant though as the image is just stupid. If you can’t immediately see that you should never be allowed near anything electrical.
And there actually is a plug that is oriented like that. It’s a Nema 6-15. And the great thing about it is it’s a 220v 15amp connector. And the plug would also fit in a Nema6-20 which is 20amps. So even more deadly.
Neutral is also wired to live. Isn’t that a short circuit?
The neutral is hot but it’s also grounded, electricity should take the path to the ground instead of doing anything meaningful on the neutral. You could probably measure a bit of current but not 220.
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The next diagram it hallucinates may be lethal though.
That ground wire goes directly to the metal casing of the appliance.
This is fucking fantastic.
Just as a PSA, black wire to brass screw, white wire to silver screw, bare or green wire to screw on rounded prong. Also, black wire is hot, white is neutral, green is ground.
In the US*
As another PSA, if you reply on comments like this to go about wiring anything electrical, do yourself a favor and call a professional.
I mean, replacing a plug on a cord is like a basic human thing that most people should be able to do. A one minute video will show you how.
If you can’t figure out how to change out a plug, you probably can’t adult.
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Adult checking in here. I’ve never had to replace a plug for anything… can’t say I know how to either.
If the only thing wrong with your appliance is a damaged cord, which usually happens near where it’s plugged into the wall, and it is a three-pronged cord, the information above is sufficient to replace the plug. Note that you will need to be able to identify the three wires and the color they represent, which is usually followed in decent power cords (of course, not all of them are decent).
Absolutely, if you aren’t confident in your knowledge and don’t have someone who can verify your work, don’t do it. It’s cheaper to throw away any given appliance than it is to throw away your home via an electrical fire. But basic AC electricity isn’t that complicated, even if it’s more complicated than basic DC electricity.
Except when white is hot for odd light switch layouts. (Which should be wrapped in black tape, but you know Shady DYI or I Know a Guy electricians.)
I get that it’s a bad idea to trust AI to something so important. And that it’s probably going to shock or kill you.
But since I’m not an electrician, ELI5. What’s wrong with this diagram?
In addition to what the other person said, there’s a wire here connecting the two prongs together. This is a short circuit and would at least blow a breaker and at worst start a fire.
This picture is so frustrating. There’s no apparent source for the “live” wire. But if you tried following this with your real wiring (white, black and green do exist), you would be connecting your hot, neutral and ground lines all together. I doubt it would kill you at 120 V but it would definitely trip your breaker the moment you plug it in, and almost certainly make some nice big arcs.
Its ok, the AI predicted this and oriented the prongs incorrectly so there is no chance to accidentally plug it into an outlet.
The outlet has three wires (black, white, and green), and the device to be plugged in has three wires (black, white, and green). The whole point of the plug is to connect each color wire to its counterpart, and only to its counterpart.
This diagram is the same as sticking a fork in all 3 holes on an outlet.
I showed this to my electrician dad. He had a chuckle.
No this one is safe. It’s specifically designed to power geomantic devices, not electrical ones.
No you won’t, you won’t be able to plug that one in
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Instructions unclear, balls are tight and I can feel a 60Hz hum. When do I insert the neutral wire?
Bend over and I’ll show you
Why is it on the floor next to the soap I just dropped?
Because safety standards in porn are for rubbery devices only. Metal ones are juuust fine, now stop fluffing, our star needs to get back in there!
I just realized I have no idea how electeicity works 💀
(Magic particles goes zzzzzzzap)
My understanding is not much better. It’s send electrons across wire.
It’s not even that! The electrons don’t even move particularly much. The energy is moved by the E/M field created around the circuit, which is even more wild and mind bending.
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Pardon my ignorance but could someone explain this and how it’s supposed to look like?
White, black, and green coming up the wire. Black to black, white to white, green to ground (not applicable with this type of plug). As wired it would flip the circuit breaker virtually instantly but, if you are really lucky, electrocute you or start a fire with that extra green cord sticking out.
=D
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=wiring+a+plug&ia=images&iax=images
you can more or less see the differences there. Outlets (typically) have the colors in the op’s picture, plugs are often different. Some of the ideas are expressed in the pic, like the clamps, while others seem to be a weird skewing of outlets and plugs, and some are obviously just bizarre (read, idiotic for a person with any brainpower) like the white-to-black-to-green pathing.
That’s like natural selection in action. Of course I wouldn’t want anyone injured, but if you blindly trust something like this, you almost deserve what might happen to you.
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Everytime someone ask AI for wiring diagram, Medhi’s mom will go slap them with a slipper.
It’s almost as though an AI designed to make pictures of kittens with boobs has no understanding of how electricity works.
