Post #188339
2026-01-30 18:08 UTC
Replies (17)
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@jolt@telegrafverket.cc 2026-03-03 06:34
@shafik@hachyderm.io yes, an LLM doesnt known if its knowledge is true or false, its just information that looks the same to it. Training an LLM is already expensive, and having it check information on sources every time it build an answer would be more expensive still and I don't think the companies care about that.
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@shafik@hachyderm.io 2026-01-30 19:36
Ok this has left my network. I am better known for my C++ quizzes: https://hachyderm.io/tags/Cpppolls and my cursed code: https://hachyderm.io/search?q=from%3Ashafik+cursed+code&type=statuses Also my dad jokes but I don't have handy reference for those, so you will have to just follow if you like dad jokes.
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@shafik@hachyderm.io 2026-01-31 18:41
https://hachyderm.io/@shafik/115991172528485981
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@shafik@hachyderm.io 2026-03-04 19:27
"AI Translations Are Adding ‘Hallucinations’ to Wikipedia Articles": https://www.404media.co/ai-translations-are-adding-hallucinations-to-wikipedia-articles/
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@arthfach@arthfach.com 2026-01-30 19:24
@shafik This also implies to me that Wikipedia is less and less trustworthy as time goes on and AI slop replaces researched material.
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@Alexjgriffith@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-01-30 19:27
@shafik this aligns with my experience, where an AI "summary" will turn up a useful reference, but the reference does not corroborate the summary.
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@mrundkvist@archaeo.social 2026-01-30 19:44
@shafik Yep, there's no intelligence there. A reference is just yet another sequence of words that is statistically probable. #aibubble
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@TheCybermatron@someone.elses.computer 2026-01-30 20:07
@shafik Welcome to the life of every University lecturer marking essays right now.
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@stepheneb@ruby.social 2026-01-30 20:13
@shafik Interesting! “Our early interventions with participants who were flagged as using generative AI for exercises that would not enter mainspace seemed to head off their future use of generative AI. We supported 6,357 new editors in fall 2025, and only 217 of them (or 3%) had multiple AI alerts. Only 5% of the participants we supported had mainspace AI alerts. That means thousands of participants successfully edited Wikipedia without using generative AI to draft their content.”
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@Susan60@aus.social 2026-01-30 21:05
@shafik It’s not all bad. They do refer to where AI can be useful, but clearly copying & pasting from it is not recommended. A good read for teachers.
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@MartinEscardo@mathstodon.xyz 2026-01-31 00:34
@shafik Yes. Indeed. Today I opened Claude to try to find a reference for something I know is true, but is not original with me, to cite in a paper I am writing. The first answer was a proof, which (in this particular case) was correct. But then I told it that I didn't want a proof, only a reference to cite. I had told it in advance that I already knew it is true. So it gave me a reference. When I looked at it, there was nothing in there stating or proving what I wanted. So I complained and I got an "apology" (I am not sure machines can or are even entitled to apologize - at best, they should apologize on behalf of their creators). Then it tried again, and it again gave me a reference that didn't have what I wanted. The third time I tried, it said it gave up, that what I wanted is nowhere to be found in the literature. But this is wrong. I've seen it before, I know it is true because I can prove it (and Claude itself can prove it (correctly this time), but course not out of nothing). Don't ever trust a reference given by genAI unless you check it yourself. The references I got after explicitly asking for a reference, and nothing else, didn't have what I asked for. The machine just makes things up in a probabilistic way. When it starts "apologizing" then you can know for sure that it is rather unlikely that you will get anything useful from it. Even more concerning is if it doesn't apologize. You may suppose that the answer is right and use it for whatever purpose you had in mind. Good luck with that.
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@shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-01-31 08:52
@shafik This certainly mirrors my personal experience (and why I'll keep calling them lie-bots) where all these tools added "citations" and "links" (in Google, Bing, etc "AI summary") but it's not "real" because it's just looking for a plausible real link not one that actually says what it has imagined (as a summary). If you want specific lists of things, you can get all sorts of links attached (the lists are wrong) or just the weather (link will usually contradict the claim).
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@luc@chaos.social 2026-01-31 12:27
@shafik the few times I've looked up references on Wikipedia, the experience was similar and I don't think this was related to LLMs having written the thing I wanted to learn more about but turned out to not be mentioned at all in the alleged source A comparative study might be better than a blanket "it's frequently wrong". Of course I expect LLMs to perform worse than humans but the context would be helpful to put the numbers into perspective
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@Anomnomnomaly@beige.party 2026-01-31 13:29
@shafik That's probably because most genai is referencing his Nazinesses grokipedia, which has been proven to be full of bullshit and white supremacy rhetoric.
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@antimu0n@furry.engineer 2026-01-31 21:04
@shafik It's becoming clearer every day that every AI datacenter on the planet must be destroyed. Wether by military saturation bombing, legal action, individual sabotage, or (preferably) a mass movement of millions marching onto premises with hammers and blowtorches, it needs to happen, and soon.
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@gkrnours@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-02-01 23:28
@shafik I was always curious if genAI citation where also generated by AI and that auote seems to say so. It is concerning as some of my colleagues give a lot of credit to the presence of source, without checking
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@dain@hachyderm.io 2026-02-07 14:35
@shafik I think this is an excellent article without the usual hype or hate, clearly articulating appropriate use cases and setting the right expectations. Wikipedia might end up being not just a great encyclopedia, but an organisation that figures out (under duress) how to incorporate LLMs into writing about facts that is helping instead of destroying the process.