The pro LLM rant is weird, LLMs "hallucinate" in creating detailed elaborate lies, the frontier models still do this egregiously, an LLM written article by default has 0 value since every single line could be true or it could be a convincingly crafted lie, every line has to be fact checked
I'm using Gemini 3.1 pro to help me research my thesis, it still with search enabled and on pro mode, invents entire papers that don't exist, and lies about the contents of existing papers to relate them to the context or to appease me, if I submitted an LLM written article based on the results its given me 80% of the article would be lies
Commenting to complain that the article is LLM written is helpful too since some people aren't able to distinguish
> an LLM written article by default has 0 value since every single line could be true or it could be a convincingly crafted lie, every line has to be fact checked
The exact same thing is true of Human speech. You have no idea if anything a human says is true until you fact check it. But you don't fact check everything every person says, do you?
So what do you do instead? You use heuristics. Simple - and quite flawed - subconscious rules to stop worrying about things. You find a person you like, and you classify them "trustworthy", and believe almost all of what they say, not considering if any of it might be false. But of course, humans are fallible, and many of them receive "poisoned" input, and even hallucinate (making up information). They then spread that false information around. Yes, even the people you trust.
And when you're faced with something untrue, said by someone you trust, you rationalize it. "Oh, they just made a mistake." And you completely ignore that the person you trust told you a falsehood. Life is hard enough without having to question if everything we hear is false. So we just accept falsehoods from some people, and not others.
LLMs are likely more factual and knowledgeable today than humans are, thanks to their constant improvements via reinforcement. They're going to keep getting better too. But they'll never be perfect. Rather than rejecting anything they produce, my suggestion would be to do what you do with humans: trust them a little, verify big things, let the little things go, accept that there will be errors, and move on with life.
If you are asking an LLM to cite it's sources you are wasting your time and degrading the quality of the response. LLMs have no inherent mechanism for "knowledge source tracking", because that isn't at all how they work. We're trying to get there with agentic stacks, but it's still too new.
For sparse knowledge tasks, where you know that the model can't possibly have much training because even humans themselves don't have much knowledge there, use it as a brainstorming partner, not as a source. Or put relevant papers in it's context to help you eval those papers in relation to your work. But it's just going to hurt itself in confusion trying to tie fuzzy ideas to sparse sources embedded in pages upon pages of mildly related google search results.
If they can't distinguish LLM text, then why should they care?
Anti-AI people like to bring up hallucination as if everything AI generates is false.
I can write pages of text, with my own content, and then use AI to improve my writing and clarity. Then I review and edit. It might have some LLM markers in there, which I remove sometimes because it's distracting. But the final, AI assisted writing is easier to read and better organized. But all the ideas are mine. Hallucinations are not remotely a problem in this case.
If it's used to create a false narrative (like a deep fake), sure, you should care. But if it's used as an alternative to a stock photo, or as an easy way to make an infographic then no, I don't think you should care.
Why should I care? The world is full of false narratives.
How can I have the bandwidth to care about everything all of the time?
I swear that more than half of the complaining that I find here comes from priveledged people bike shedding over inane topics, and who have never had to really worry about serious survival-level (how am I going to eat today?) issues in their lives.
No, you're being weird (why are you calling people weird anyway, not helpful).
You're complaining about facts that have been true since words have been written on paper. If you read the article with the same criticality you read any other article you wont have the problem you complain about.
The reality is, you're only complaining because you hate ai. Cool, but dont dress it up and resort to name calling to browbeat the other guy
If I read something and cannot tell that it is AI generated, then there's no problem.
If it has AI tells then I wont bother to continue reading because it was either written by an AI or it was written by someone who can't tell the difference.
That's very funny to have my exact reaction present in the first comment, I was thinking "that's turquoise" but I do also feel like turquoise is green, like you'd call the Copenhagen copper domes green, and the word verdigris comes from green
Certainly AI editorialised. I wonder if this is because English isn’t their first language, and they are confidence compensating. I’ve worked with a lot of folks also from Philippines and the Tagalog/English mix leads to some confidence challenges sometimes.
You might be surprised…or you might not. I’ve found it’s a good barometer for whether you actually don’t like AI writing or you just don’t like bad AI writing.
1. This test has really zero to do with what we're talking about. Stylized fiction is a completely separate domain from non-fiction writing of personal anecdotes. There's effectively zero relation between them.
2. Picked the human 5 out of 5. Since it's pointless to take as a judge of preference due to 1), I took it as a test of "spot the AI", and clearly it was obvious to me in every instance.
3. Of course we just "don't like bad AI writing". "Good AI writing" would be unnoticeable. This is incredibly rare in the domain we're talking about.
Small, pithy quotes vs dozens of paragraphs are rather different things.
It does not surprise me in the least that a machine can produce excellent small quotes. Markov chains have been production some fantastic stuff for decades, for example, and they're about as complicated as an abacus. https://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/
It seems I chose AI 5 times out of 5. I'm not a native speaker, so I might have preferred a slightly more straightforward text.
On one side, I think this suffers a lot from selection bias: short AI snippets specifically chosen by humans for their quality and they do not necessarily reflect the average experience of AI text. On the other hand, AI generated text does not preclude human editing.
This is like the coke vs pepsi tests, where people prefer pepsi when given a small amount but prefer coke in larger amounts. short snippets aren't a good test of anything useful.
I got 4/5 human. #3 - I chose AI, it was very close.
I noticed something-humans will use words precisely and loosely at the same time. AI will seem like it’s precise but a lot of the wording it uses can be cut or replaced by something else without losing much meaning.
A few paragraphs isn't writing, it's a snippet. The shorter something is, the better AI will be at mimicking it, because underlying flaws are less likely to be made apparent.
Music is another great example of this. I enjoy techno/trance type stuff, but YouTube is becoming borderline unusable for this genre due to AI slop. You'd think AI would do a good job of producing tracks here since this genre is certainly somewhat formulaic. And about 2 minutes into a lengthy track I'd probably do relatively mediocrely at determining whether it was human or AI, but by about 10 minutes into a track it's often painfully obvious. I run this experiment regularly as I find myself having to skip the AI slop which YouTube seems obsessed with recommending anyhow.
Ironically AI is probably providing a boon to human DJs here, because actively seeking them out it is one of the only ways to escape YouTube's sloparithm.
I preferred the AI 4 out of 5 times. That's a little confronting. And judging by the amount of cope in the comments section, others found it the same. I guess it is a small test, but I think it successfully makes it's point.
At this point, I assume most LinkedIn users use AI to assist in generating posts anyway, so the distinction kinda becomes pointless. Nobody likes reading AI generated posts, and nobody ever really liked reading LinkedIn posts either.
At least you aren’t wasting time writing something that people don’t like reading by hand. I just assumed that AI is trained on executive communication which is why they sound like a CEO.
Overhired has nothing to do with the talent pool and just means they hired more than they actually needed or wanted, if the talent pool is large enough then everyone can overhire
Of course the judgement about whether people overhired is subjective on a per-company basis. My point is, you can't hire people who don't exist, and the ways to get people into the industry are limited. All other things equal, we would expect massive overhiring to be matched with very low unemployment in the industry, and the correction should not go below some baseline.
A new user is much more likely to scan the codebase and report vulnerabilities so they can be fixed than illegally exploit them since most people aren't criminals
This article is LLM written and unsourced so the entire thing could be a hallucination and there's no reason to trust any claim made in it, don't even read it
> Another solution is to make software makers responsible and liable for the output of their products. It's long been a problem that there is little legal responsibility, but we shouldn't just accept it. If Ford makes exploding cars, they are liable. If OpenAI makes software that endangers people, it should be the same.
That kind of thinking is exactly why LLMs are so censored, because people think OAI should be liable if someone uses chatgpt to commit cyber crimes
How about cyber crimes are already illegal and we just punish whoever uses the new tools to commit crimes instead of holding the tool maker liable
This gets complex if LLMs enable children to commit complex crimes but that's different from just outright restricting the tool for everyone because someone might misuse it
There's always some wedge issue that means "don't punish the toolkmaker" is not politically viable. You can pick from guns to legal drugs to illegal drugs to all kinds of emotive things.
And once the wedge is in and the concept of maker responsibility is planted, it expands to people's pet issues, obviously.
The actual line of who gets punished just ends up at some equilibrium in the middle. Largely arbitrarily.
I think the classic one is pedophiles and protecting children.
If someone uses ChatGPT to create child porn or worse, to get help tracking down and meeting children, there is NO way in hell the public will accept "don't punish the toolmaker" as a principle.
"It's just a neutral tool" gets a lot harder to claim once a vendor starts specifically training and marketing the model for its ability to bypass security controls.
Yes, pentesting tools, even automated ones, are often legal. But they commonly do run up against legal restrictions and risks. They're marketed very differently from ChatGPT.
I opt into it on my site it's just a login option you can ignore if you want to log in another way, but for those who use it it removes the friction of writing out a password and verifying the email
It can’t just be ignored, it covers content, and if someone accidentally clicks the wrong thing… poof, they now have that site linked to their Google account.
Thanks for sharing! It's not really easily ignored for some people (I ignore it the same way I ignored banner ads in the 00s). I'm curious if you have any metrics on bounce ratios with/without the option. The sentiment here on HN appears to be largely negative but HN does not represent the population at large. I find that many people don't mind or even like a lot of stuff that HN tends to hate.
I'm using Gemini 3.1 pro to help me research my thesis, it still with search enabled and on pro mode, invents entire papers that don't exist, and lies about the contents of existing papers to relate them to the context or to appease me, if I submitted an LLM written article based on the results its given me 80% of the article would be lies
Commenting to complain that the article is LLM written is helpful too since some people aren't able to distinguish
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