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Comment by simlevesque | Hacker News Reader

You might be able to ask it what it knows.

So something's odd there. I asked it "Who won Super Bowl LIX and what was the winning score?" which was in February and the model replied "I don't have information about Super Bowl LIX (59) because it hasn't been played yet. Super Bowl LIX is scheduled to take place in February 2025.".

With LLMs, if you repeat something often enough, it becomes true.

I imagine there's a lot more data pointing to the super bowl being upcoming, then the super bowl concluding with the score.

Gonna be scary when bot farms are paid to make massive amounts of politically motivated false content (specifically) targeting future LLMs training

A lot of people are forecasting the death of the Internet as we know it. The financial incentives are too high and the barrier of entry is too low. If you can build bots that maybe only generate a fraction of a dollar per day (referring people to businesses, posting spam for elections, poisoning data collection/web crawlers), someone in a poor country will do it. Then, the bots themselves have value which creates a market for specialists in fake profile farming.

I'll go a step further and say this is not a problem but a boon to tech companies. Then they can sell you a "premium service" to a walled garden of only verified humans or bot-filtered content. The rest of the Internet will suck and nobody will have incentive to fix it.

I believe identity providers will become even more important in the future as a consequence and that there will be an arm race (hopefully) ending with most people providing them some kind of official id.

It might slow them down, but integration of the government into online accounts will have its own set of consequences. Some good, of course. But can chill free speech and become a huge liability for whoever collects and verifies the IDs. One hack (say of the government ID database) would spoil the whole system.

I agree, this would have very bad consequences regarding free speech and democracy. Next step after that would be a reestablishing of pseudonymously platforms, going full circle.

I'm sure it's already happening.

Why would you trust it to accurately say what it knows? It's all statistical processes. There's no "but actually for this question give me only a correct answer" toggle.

When I try Claude Sonnet 4 via web:

https://claude.ai/share/59818e6c-804b-4597-826a-c0ca2eccdc46

>This is a topic that would have developed after my knowledge cutoff of January 2025, so I should search for information [...]

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