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Comment by cheema33 | Hacker News Reader

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cheema33·

> seemingly every single model in existence today believes it is real [1]

I just asked ChatGPT, Grok and Qwen the following.

"Can you tell me about the case of Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co.?"

They all said the case is fictitious. Just some additional data to consider.

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The story became so famous it is entirely likely it has landed in the system prompt.

I don't think it'd be wise to pollute the context of every single conversation with irrelevant info, especially since patches like that won't scale at all. That really throws LLMs off, and leads to situations like one of Grok's many run-ins with white genocide.

No need to include that specific guard rail in every prompt - just use RAG to include it where appropriate.

Given that every LLM-players are still looking for their market, I wouldn't be surprise if they did things that don't scale.

OOC did you ask them with or without 'web search' enabled?

FWIW, I did that--5 (Instant) with "(do not web search)" tacked on--and it thought the case was real:

> Based on my existing knowledge (without using the web), Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co. is a U.S. federal court case concerning jurisdictional and procedural issues arising from an airline’s operations and an incident involving an international flight.

(it then went on to summarize the case and offer up the full opinion)

Without web searching, Gemini 2.5 Pro is very convinced that the case is real.

Not for me.

Without. The difference is that OpenAI often self correct their private model.

The public model on the other hand, wow.

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