from Hacker News

The Curious Case of Quentell

by hwayne on 1/27/25, 5:15 PM with 7 comments

• by yellowapple on 1/27/25, 9:16 PM

  I wouldn't be so quick to attribute the embellished biographies to AI. That's certainly a possibility, but it's also just as possible that these are humans going off of verbal/oral histories that morphed in the ongoing game of Telephone. Plenty of humans get things mixed up, after all.

  Still, it's worth being vigilant about this sort of thing, AI or no - and LLMs are certainly increasing in the quality and quantity of bullshit they can produce. People give Wikipedia a lot of flack for being "editable by everyone", but the emphasis on providing actual citations for claims is an important one - to the point that I'll readily trust an "amateur"/"hobbyist" work that cites its sources over a "professional" work that doesn't.

• by ziddoap on 1/27/25, 5:53 PM

  I'm not very anti-LLM/AI, but this is one of the scarier parts, to me at least.

  Data that is obscure, not easily fact-checked, and (outside of a handful of people) there's no motivation to fact check it.

  Incorrect data will sit there, mostly viewed by other bots, incorporated into the next model. The issue is just going to snowball.

  Good luck to any future historians that want to look back at this time period.

• by wduquette on 1/27/25, 7:26 PM

  The Law of Unintended Consequences is unavoidable; as so often I read this post, and said, "Yes, that's just what would happen. Oh, dear."

• by aaroninsf on 1/27/25, 9:14 PM

  A lovely field trip to the morgue of Dead Internet theory!

  "Nothing is real; everything is permitted."