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Comment by glemion43 | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a source for this?

Carbon copy would mean over fitting

I saw weird results with Gemini 2.5 Pro when I asked it to provide concrete source code examples matching certain criteria, and to quote the source code it found verbatim. It said it in its response quoted the sources verbatim, but that wasn't true at all—they had been rewritten, still in the style of the project it was quoting from, but otherwise quite different, and without a match in the Git history.

It looked a bit like someone at Google subscribed to a legal theory under which you can avoid copyright infringement if you take a derivative work and apply a mechanical obfuscation to it.

LLM's are not archives of information.

People seem to have this belief, or perhaps just general intuition, that LLMs are a google search on a training set with a fancy language engine on the front end. That's not what they are. The models (almost) self avoid copyright, because they never copy anything in the first place, hence why the model is a dense web of weight connections rather than an orderly bookshelf of copied training data.

Picture yourself contorting your hands under a spotlight to generate a shadow in the shape of a bird. The bird is not in your fingers, despite the shadow of the bird, and the shadow of your hand, looking very similar. Furthermore, your hand-shadow has no idea what a bird is.

For a task like this, I expect the tool to use web searches and sift through the results, similar to what a human would do. Based on progress indicators shown during the process, this is what happens. It's not an offline synthesis purely from training data, something you would get from running a model locally. (At least if we can believe the progress indicators, but who knows.)

While true in general, they do know many things verbatim. For instance, GPT-4 can reproduce the Navy SEAL copypasta word for word with all the misspellings.

I'd imagine more than a few basement dwellers could as well.

It is the classic "He made it up"

Source is just read the definition of what "temperature" is.

But honestly source = "a knuckle sandwich" would be appropriate here.

Threatening violence*, even in this virtual way and encased in quotation marks, is not allowed here.

Edit: you've been breaking the site guidelines badly in other threads as well. (To pick one example of many: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46601932.) We've asked you many times not to.

I don't want to ban your account because your good contributions are good and I do believe you're well-intentioned. But really, can you please take the intended spirit of this site more to heart and fix this? Because at some point the damage caused by poisonous comments is worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

* it would be more accurate to say "using violent language as a trope in an argument" - I don't believe in taking comments like this literally, as if they're really threatening violence. Nonetheless you can't post this way to HN.

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