The Curious Case of Quentell | Hacker News Reader

The Curious Case of Quentell

blog.startifact.com

80 pointshwayne7 comments

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.

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.

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.)

Human beings have been doing much the same for a very long time. It is particularly obvious on social media, but it has always hppend.

> Good luck to any future historians that want to look back at this time period.

Historians will look at primary sources and fact check them. However, society at large has always had huge misconceptions about history. Sometimes they are corrected (and its a game of whack-a-mole) and sometimes they spread.

>Human beings have been doing much the same for a very long time.

If you completely ignore the scale & speed at which LLMs can generate information compared to humans, sure.

It seems silly to ignore that, though.

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."

A lovely field trip to the morgue of Dead Internet theory!

"Nothing is real; everything is permitted."

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