[HN Gopher] The Curious Case of Quentell
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       The Curious Case of Quentell
        
       Author : hwayne
       Score  : 64 points
       Date   : 2025-01-27 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.startifact.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.startifact.com)
        
       | ziddoap wrote:
       | I'm not very anti-LLM/AI, but this is one of the scarier parts,
       | to me at least.
       | 
       | Data that is obscure, not easily fact-checked, and (outside of a
       | handful of people) there's no motivation to fact check it.
       | 
       | Incorrect data will sit there, mostly viewed by other bots,
       | incorporated into the next model. The issue is just going to
       | snowball.
       | 
       | Good luck to any future historians that want to look back at this
       | time period.
        
         | nine_k wrote:
         | Such consequences might be undesired, but hardly unanticipated
         | or surprising. Not to the smart folks who came up with LLMs.
         | 
         | (A lot of what we're having around us now has been anticipated
         | by sci-fi, but earlier sci-fi largely failed to predict the
         | internet, so we have fewer predictions about such stuff. Lem's
         | "Futurological Congress" could be seen as a weird anticipation
         | of a deeply faked world.)
        
       | wduquette wrote:
       | The Law of Unintended Consequences is unavoidable; as so often I
       | read this post, and said, "Yes, that's just what would happen.
       | Oh, dear."
        
       | aaroninsf wrote:
       | A lovely field trip to the morgue of Dead Internet theory!
       | 
       | "Nothing is real; everything is permitted."
        
       | yellowapple wrote:
       | I wouldn't be so quick to attribute the embellished biographies
       | to AI. That's certainly a possibility, but it's also just as
       | possible that these are humans going off of verbal/oral histories
       | that morphed in the ongoing game of Telephone. Plenty of humans
       | get things mixed up, after all.
       | 
       | Still, it's worth being vigilant about this sort of thing, AI or
       | no - and LLMs are certainly increasing in the quality and
       | quantity of bullshit they can produce. People give Wikipedia a
       | lot of flack for being "editable by everyone", but the emphasis
       | on providing actual citations for claims is an important one - to
       | the point that I'll readily trust an "amateur"/"hobbyist" work
       | that cites its sources over a "professional" work that doesn't.
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-27 23:00 UTC)