Yeah, AI (not LLM) can be a very useful tool in doing research, but this takes about deciding if a drug should be approved or not.

You are correct. However, more often than not it's just like the image describes and people are actually applying LLM's en masse to random problems.

Hallucinating studies is however very on brand for LLM as opposed to other types of machine learning.

what ai, apart from language generators "makes up studies"

Technically, LLMs as used in Generative AI fall under the umbrella term "machine learning"…except that until recently machine learning was mostly known for "the good stuff" you're referring to (finding patterns in massive datasets, classifying data entries like images, machine vision, etc.). So I feel like continuing to use the term ML for the good stuff helps steer the conversation away from what is clearly awful about genAI.

That’s because “AI” has come to mean anything with an algorithm and a training set. Technologies under this umbrella are vastly different, but nontechnical people (especially the press) don’t understand the difference.

The problems with AI we talk of here is mostly with generative AI. Protein folding, diagnostic patterns and weather prediction works a bit differently than image making or text writing services.

Right. You're talking about specialized AI that are programmed and trained to perform very specific tasks, and are absolutely useless outside of those tasks.

Llama are generalized AI which can't do any of those things. The problem is that what it's good at, really REALLY good at, is giving the appearance of specialized AI. Of course this is only a problem because people keep getting fooled into thinking that generalized AI can do all the same things that specialize AI does.

Obviously that should be in an advisory capacity, and not making decisions (like approving drugs for human use [which i heavy doubt was actually happening])