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Comment by smithkl42 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with Doctorow about the de-humanizing nature of this sort of work - but to your specific point about fact checking, it'd honestly be fastest to outsource that to a different LLM, maybe ChatGPT in "deep research" mode or something like that.

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"Here's a technology which is known to be confidently wrong pretty frequently. I'm going to use it to fact check things."

If you have tokens to burn, using new sessions to critique the work produced in other sessions greatly improves reliability. Asking the same question multiple different ways, and to more than one LLM, also helps a lot.

That approach may be a viable heuristic but it will only get you so far. It's like flagging an opinion because it doesn't rhyme with the opinions of others.

That's not what humans do when they are fact finding, though. It's not what a (proper) scientist would do if she/he discovered a great insight or theory and was wondering whether it was true.

If you're turning to LLMs for great insight or theory, you're definitely doing it wrong. These tools are for well trod terrain, and when they're really just making shit up, it's almost always different shit each time. So yes, it's a heuristic, but for dealing with the stochastic weirdness these models sometimes spit out it works pretty damn well.

Querying an LLM for 'facts' is dangerous. Using some IR technique and incorporating LLMs to gauge relevancy and semantic alignment is a viable approach.

pay all the other 'ai's to crowdsource .. or maybe cloudsource, a truth boolean. Then when they all ingest each others answers slowly over time all the answers become the same, wether truthful or not.

It's a powerful tool that can be misused by the incompetent, like most other powerful tools.

The other thing is that the missing books can be created on demand and published in a couple of hours, using the same tech that mistakenly added them to the list in the first place.

They'll suck, of course, but so do most of the books on any given "Summer Reading Guide."

So it's a sort of "reverse memory hole" where things that never existed contemporaneously to the list can now be given life to invalidate fact checking.

Which just reminds us that the committee who awarded the Nobel Prize to Kissinger and Arafat is the same one that overlooked Borges and Eco.

No. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, while the Literature prize and the other prizes defined by Nobel’s will are awarded by the Swedish Academy.

I see.

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