cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/28693796
Check the comments of the original post for the stupidity.
For those of you without an electrical background, the diagram shows the protective earth connected directly to phase, with phase and neutral also joined.
Correctly wired, this would be a three pin plug, with the earth wire connected to the earth pin in the plug, with the other end connected to the metal casing of the appliance. This is a critical safety feature, which will cause the circuit protection to trip in the event a phase wire contacts the metal of whatever this is connected to.
If this was actually done, the most likely outcome is it would trip a circuit breaker, but if the neutral was broken, it would connect phase directly to the casing, and likely electrocute someone.
If you’re asking a large language model for directions to wire electrical circuits I think you might have a bona fide mental disability and I’m not being funny or silly in any way.
I feel like federating this image is not in humanity’s best interest
Do you have dc in your plugs in usa or did the ai mess it up so much
Even with dc this is fucked, + and - are shorted. Its fucked regardless
No, those plugs are 110-120v ac
Edit: assuming this is supposed to be a standard plug, which should have the prongs side by side not on top of each other.
Actually it wouldn’t do anything because you would not even be able to plug it in since the prongs are facing the wrong way and therefore would not fit into the socket.
That’s also a fair point, I’m not familiar with this particular plug, so didn’t pick up on that right away.
Yeah… I tried to ask it in Danish, and this is what it came up with…
I’ve assembled a few plugs myself… And this certain isn’t quite how I did it…
EDIT: This was actually Gemini 2.5 Pro… But it’s not very “pro”
Google should just send gemini to the Google Graveyard™
It is long overdue that those companies can be held legally responsible for what their AI produces.
If i had drawn up and published such an image, I probably could be drawn in court. Time for AI companies to fall under the same rule.
There have been cases of people poisoned, people looking for psychological help getting recommended to commit suicide, etc.
Time to drag those companies in court.
To be fair you are incredibly stupid if you ask this technology to render critical instructions and don’t cross-reference it with any actual concrete information.
I do think that these companies should be held responsible for some negative consequences of their actions but people are going to be stupid and hurt themselves no matter what.
They trust something that is hailed to them as the ultimative super brain. They didn’t get warned that the service is not a reliable source of information.
If you have to tell your customers not to stick kitchen knifes into children and not to attempt to stop the chainsaws’ running chain with your hand, AI-providing services should at least be required to put thick warnings on their pages not to trust their lives. I just bought a kitchen-machine, and it has pages over pages of warnings in them for about things I would not have thought that people would need to be warned of…
The day will come when Fuck AI and Confidently Inncorect will have no choice, but to merge into one community.
And then a new literally Fuck AI community will emerge! Or just not, hopefully.
I was taught to call the neutral “common” cause neutral makes it sound safe.
Typically in a US house it should be safe. Just assuming it is actually safe on the other hand is profoundly unsafe.
Incorrect. The neutral wire is a current carrying conductor and will generally be just as “hot” as the hot wire.
Okay fine, I’ll jump in. The neutral will carry the same amperage as a hot in a circuit. When you add yourself to the circuit accidentally, your resistance and the resistance of the intended load will divide up the voltage relative to your resistances. But the same amperage will flow through each of you assuming no other electrical pathway exists.
Image being confidently incorrect in the comments of a confidently incorrect post.
Under normal circuit conditions, the only voltage present on Neutral would be whatever voltage loss is occurring between the load and the tie in point between neutral and earth.
Different circumstances are different. Neturals are current carrying conductors. Neutrals are also grounded (as in bonded to ground at the main panel). In the case of someone wiring a recepticle or making joints in a junction box without turning off the circuit, one side of the neutral will almost certainly become disconnected from its return path in that process. When doing electrical work you absolutely do not consider the N wire safe for this reason.
Sure, if you touch the N lug in a hot panel or the N side of a receptacle while everything’s properly wired you won’t get shocked, but nobody has any reason to touch the N conductor if you aren’t working working on the circuit/box/panel. I’ll admit my use of “generally” above isnt exactly appropriate when you consider that a home doesnt “generally” have someone working on the wiring. Similarly my “incorrect” at the comment above me is less than 100% accurate, but I maintain that in the case of actual electrical work being done (the only time this conversation matters) you can never consider N to be safe.
All circuits are hot. All guns are loaded. All knives are sharp.
Isn’t the common used in three way circuits as a hot at some point? Been decades since I learned about those, so my memory is very vague.
Three phase circuits when perfectly balanced actually have no current on the N wire, which is kindof the exception to my “N wires are current carrying conductors” above, but very few scenarios in real life actually have perfectly balanced three phase loads. That’s kindof the opposite of what you were saying, but memory can be weird like that sometimes.
It’s also relatively common to use a white wire as your third hot for three phase circuits that dont have or need a N at all. The white wire isnt actually N in that case, but a layman with cursory knowledge of electrical work would look at the white wire with voltage to ground and say the N is hot. By the code you’re supposed to mark the white wire with colored tape in this scenario to indicate that it’s hot and not N.
If this was actually done, the most likely outcome is it would trip a circuit breaker
Or explode the plug in someone’s hand, depending on the circuit breaker and the wire gauge
On a domestic plug the chances of injury are low, but not zero. It would definitely damage both the plug and socket, possibly burn your hand, and definitely be an exciting moment.
Would you even be able to plug the damn thing in? I’ve assembled plugs before and I don’t think this would work, like at all. One wouldn’t even be able to reach the point of failure, typically when you buy plugs to wire up like this just have spots for you to screw in your wires, also I don’t think any country has that specific two vertically oriented connector setup.
I’ve had a cheapo electric kettle plug explode in my hand due to melted contacts in the base touching each other (I’m not sure why the plug exploded and not the base, probably a shitty connection in the plug). I didn’t get injured but it was indeed quite exciting.
I had a cheapo Chinese charger explode in the socket. It was indeed quite exciting.
If done that way, it wouldn’t even fit into a socket. Prongs are rotated 90°
Huh, yeah, you are right. I’m not from the US so it didn’t immediately jump out at me
There’s no live wire in this diagram. There is a section of black wire that is labeled “live”, but it’s just connecting the ground wire to the top prong with no voltage applied. The unlabeled white wire shorts them together. If the white wire was cut, then the top prong would be ground.
This is just a fancy way to short neutral and ground.
It’s a plug, not an outlet. I made the same mistake because it’s such an astonishingly bad diagram.
Hot phase comes in from the prong, travels to the screw via black wire, then directly into ground.
Of course, it’s a moot point because you cannot plug this into a North American outlet, the prongs are in the wrong position.
Until you plug it in. Then it’s a weird way to test your GFCI.
How? The cord coming from the plug would be wired to an appliance. How is having an unplugged appliance going to test anything?
Well, since this is all bollocks, who’s to say what’s on the other side of the cord…
There is no ground plug in this diagram, only phase and neutral. With the ground connected to phase.
deleted by creator
Forgot to add “safely” to the prompt.
No you won’t… The “live” wire is just shorting neutral to ground. You’d need a second, far worse, problem for this to do anything
You may be doing what I initially did and mentally treating it as an outlet. The live prong on the displayed plug would be inserted into an real live outlet thus energizing both the neutral and ground. The dead short should quickly trip the breaker but maybe not before the outlet or plug is nice and crispified.
Huh… Yeah, fair enough
In my defense the text says outlet
but if the neutral was broken
Isn’t that what I said though?
No? You said it would trip the circuit breaker
I mean in spirit, we agree this is a nonsense wiring diagram for sure, but my interpretation is that we disagree on the details
I mean, you said you’d need a second fault on the system to get shocked, and I described that fault in the description, and said this would need to happen in order to electrocute someone.
Rereading your post a third time, that is not my take away
But the very well might have been your intention. Language is delicate like that sometimes…I don’t know what you meant, but if you tell me that’s what you meant by those words, I believe you
It also looks like plug neutral is connected to plug live too? So its one single node to ground on the plug side?
are we sure the prompt was not “how to create a plug in north America for maximum damage?” 😄
How to create a plug in North America to find an unlabelled breaker.
Nah, maximum damage would be phase to earth alone, at least in terms of human safety.
This is a great way to wreck a socket though.
Except it wouldn’t do any damage because there isn’t anything running to the plug except for a single ground wire.
Yeah sure… Until you plug it into the wall
It’s a plug, not an outlet
Current source is from the prongs.
It’s just so bad it trips you up. Also, in North America it’s fairly rare to wire a plug; much more common to wire up an outlet. In EU, didn’t many appliances ship without a wire and you were expected to install your own? Is that still a thing?
Where does that ground wire go, do you know?
everything about this is wrong. the most fundamental part is the fact that you don’t wire north american plugs. Wiring your own plugs is a british thing, hence why the case is shaped like the british plug.
In the US, split-phase 240v appliances, like dryers and electric ranges, often do not come with a plug pre-wired. This is because older homes lack a ground on the outlet side. 240v works in the US by having two (120v) hots which are 180 degrees out of phase. Outlets in older homes have 3 sockets. Two lives (black and red) and a neutral (white). Outlets in newer homes have 4 sockets. The same 3 from above as well as a ground (green or bare). Normally you buy a pre-fabricated plug and do the wiring on the appliance side but you still need to match the right prong to the right terminal.
Of course, replacement plugs are also a thing if the original becomes damaged.
Home Depot has a whole big shelf of north american plugs that anyone can wire up however they want.
In fact it was compulsory in Britain until the 1980s/90s. I’m not sure exactly when it changed, but the reason was due to different electricity companies having different sockets (and therefore plugs). It was standardised way before then, but I guess if that’s the way it has always been done nobody thinks of changing it.
My oldest (15) was just taught how to wire a plug at her high school. We’re in the UK. I don’t think I was (90s), but my dad will had shown me and I don’t remember not knowing.
you don’t wire north american plugs
I don’t? Please, do go on. I am interested to know how all my appliances apparently work by magic.
Well, yes, someone wires the plugs at the appliance cord factory, but unless you work in appliance cord manufacturing it’s typically not the appliance user. And yes, there are exceptions, such as installing some heavy appliances or replacing damaged plugs, but that shouldn’t be typical for “all” of someone’s appliances.
I’m interested to know how you are wiring plugs… and why. They are sold pre wired in my area. Are they not in yours?
North american plugs are not serviceable like british ones. The contacts are molded in plastic at the factory.
Opening a plug to service the wires is not possible. They don’t open, nor do the plugs have fuses.
Serviceable, sure, but they literally make replacement plugs that you would do yourself, in which case, knowing how to wire them is a whole, you know, thing.
I’ve wired plugs with like 12 and a large part of our house with 14 or so. Ofc, with my dad and depending on the circumstances a qualified electrician checking, but no matter how wild it got, I never made a mistake
How are there people needing help to simply wire a plug? The hardest part is to open that damn thing!
Ofc, with my dad and depending on the circumstances a qualified electrician checking, but no matter how wild it got, I never made a mistake
This is you saying you got help wiring a plug.
What if people don’t have their dad or a qualified electrician to check? They need help from somewhere. AI is a stupid place to look for it, but people need help doing things they never have before. Would you prefer they guess?
I never had a simple plug or socket checked after my first five or so. For larger networks, I just shared the plan I made in my head. And the qualified electrician was there once, for the HV lines, as legally required.
Also, not guess, but know. It’s very easy, especially plugs and sockets. Switches I can see someone pulling up the manufacturers docs to check which contacts are interconnected.
Yes, after your first five, but before that you needed help. If this is someone’s first what are they do to? How are they supposed to know without getting some sort of help?
"It’s easy, just do like my dad showed me!* isn’t helpful if they don’t know your dad.
My dad did not help me. Plugging in three strands where they obviously belong is not something someone needs help with. Again, he checked the end result. As in, one glance at the result the first time and plugging the plug into the socket in the first few times, because at age 12 an electric shock is much more problematic than at age 36.
Your dad helped you. My whole point is you can’t say people shouldn’t need help when you got help.
Because I was 12 and had not one hour of physics class or anything at that point. The people we’re talking about are most likely 18+ with lots of life experience otherwise.
Someone replied to me saying this picture of a plug is a dead circuit, because nothing is connected to anything, they genuinely don’t seem to understand what a plug is.
They walk among us.
To be fair, this circuit is absolutely safe at long as the breakers are installed.
Edit: Because this will trip the circuit breaker. It’s a short y’all.
And the neutral is unbroken.
You’re putting a lot of faith in the rest of the installation.
I was being tongue in cheek. This will pop the circuit breaker, but to your point, may cause a fire with the insulation of the neutral. So I admit, it’s not “perfectly safe.” Lol.
