Post #2248225
2026-03-29 15:53 UTC
@jneen@unstable.systems We've seen with the number of legal cases where lawyers have been caught out with fabricated cases as well as journal papers with fabricated references that the system will simply stick tokens together to meet its optimization threshold. So even if attribution hadn't been intentionally bleached away, nothing the chatbot emitted could be trusted unless there's some trustworthy deterministic (non-LLM) system that can verify the existence of citations and assess their relevance. *Everything* is a fabrication.
What concerns me is not the LLM part of the chatbot - that's just a pile of linear algebra - it's the cobbled-together UI that responds like an obsequious servile intern, Stepford ELIZA on Prozac. That part of the system is built on 30+ years of dark pattern research to keep people spending tokens. Right, wrong, as long as users keep spending, the system is operating as designed. The only acceptance test is that line goes up.
Replies (2)
-
@jneen@unstable.systems 2026-03-29 16:12
@arclight@oldbytes.space exactly! i've seen someone ask a chatbot "would you hallucinate if i asked you X" and it's just... not how it works.
-
@boxyrobot@mastodon.social 2026-03-29 21:26
@arclight@oldbytes.space @jneen@unstable.systems — this! Keeping engagement, keeping one hoping that the next response will be the right one. Feels like gambling. A recent JA Westenberg piece goes well with this: https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/116219554271259845.