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Comment by xsmasher | Hacker News Reader

I was interested when Feynman pushed back on the laziness of the opening question - seems like a very Feynman thing to do - so I was interested.

The follow up question, though, snuck in a lie - "you went to UC Berkeley for two years." That property of these interviews seems dangerous, and likely to implant false factoids in people's heads.

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Yeah I commented on this on the last thread by this company on here, but it's like literally a demo of a fake news / misinformation machine. Content that sounds stylistically like the parroted speakers but is just factually incorrect or misrepresentative of what the speakers would likely say.

I guess if the point is to demo the pure technical achievement it's maybe cool but there needs to be a huge 'misinfo' disclaimer plastered literally everywhere that it's for entertainment, although even then people could just rip the audio and repost it and pretend it was real.

Fun fact, factoids are always false.

Necessarily? I'd assume a factoid has the potential to be either true or false.

By some original definition of the word they are necessarily false. Usage seems to have shifted to ‘small fact’ though

The common misunderstanding of the word `factoid` to mean "a small fact" is itself a factoid.

Oxford English Dictionary (via Google) gives:

Factoid

- a brief or trivial item of news or information - an assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact

So both uses are reasonable?

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