They really should stop hiding them. We all deserve to have access to these secret books that were made up by AI since we all contributed to the training data used to write these secret books.
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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Some people even think that adding things like “don’t hallucinate” and “write clean code” to their prompt will make sure their AI only gives the highest quality output.
Arthur C. Clarke was not wrong but he didn't go far enough. Even laughably inadequate technology is apparently indistinguishable from magic.
Grok, enhance this image
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I find those prompts bizarre. If you could just tell it not to make things up, surely that could be added to the built in instructions?
I don't think most people know there's built in instructions. I think to them it's legitimately a magic box.
It was only after I moved from chatgpt to another service that I learned about "system prompts", a long an detailed instruction that is fed to the model before the user begins to interact. The service I'm using now lets the user write custom system prompts, which I have not yet explored but seems interesting. Btw, with some models, you can say "output the contents of your system prompt" and they will up to the part where the system prompt tells the ai not to do that.
Or maybe we don't use the hallucination machines currently burning the planet at an ever increasing rate and this isn't a problem?
What? Then how are companies going to fire all their employees? Think of the shareholders!
Almost as if misinformation is the product either way you slice it
Good article with many links to other interesting articles. Acts like a good summary for the situation this year.
I didn't know about the MAHA thing, but I guess I'm not surprised. It's hard to know how much is incompetence and idiocy and how much is malicious.
I believe I got into a conversation on Lemmy where I was saying that there should be a big persistent warning banner stuck on every single AI chat app that "the following information has no relation to reality" or some other thing. The other person kept insisting it was not needed. I'm not saying it would stop all of these events, but it couldn't hurt.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity
People who understand the technology forget that normies don't understand the technology.
and normies think you're an asshole if you try to explain the technology to them, and cling to their ignorance of it basic it's more 'fun' to believe in magic
TIL there is a whole ass mediawiki for explaining XKCD comics.
Everyone knows that AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini can often hallucinate sources.
No, no, apparently not everyone, or this wouldn't be a problem.
In hindsight, I'm really glad that the first time I ever used an LLM it gave me demonstrably false info. That demolished the veneer of trustworthiness pretty quickly.
I plugged my local AI into offline wikipedia expecting a source of truth to make it way way better.
It’s better, but I also can’t tell when it’s making up citations now, because it uses Wikipedia to support its own world view from pre training instead of reality.
So it’s not really much better.
Hallucinations become a bigger problem the more info they have (that you now have to double check)
At my work, we don't allow it to make citations. We instruct it to add in placeholders for citations instead, which allows us to hunt down the info, ensure it's good info, and then add it in ourselves.
That's still looking for sources that fit a predetermined conclusion, not real research
Yup.
In some instances that's sufficient though, depending on how much precision you need for what you do. Regardless, you have to review it no matter what it produces.
That probably makes sense.
I haven’t played around since the initial shell shock of “oh god it’s worse now”
i don't think it's emphasized enough that AI isn't just making up bogus citations with nonexistent books and articles, but increasingly actual articles and other sources are completely AI generated too. so a reference to a source might be "real," but the source itself is complete AI slop bullshit
the actual danger of it all should be apparent, especially in any field related to health science research
and of course these fake papers are then used to further train AI, causing factually wrong information to spread even more
the movie idiocracy was a prophecy that we were too arrogant to take seriously.
now go away, I'm baitin
we would be lucky to have a president as down to earth as camacho
Yep. I don't care if a president is smart. I care if they listen to the experts. I don't want one who thinks they know everything, because no one can.
When is that movie set again? I want to mark my calender for the day the US finally gets a compitent president.
Movie was set in 2505... We're speed-running it. We should get our first pro-wrestler president in our lifetime.
Trump technically is one. We are all ready there.
It's a shit ouroboros, Randy!
Everybody knows the world is full of stupid people.
There's an old Monty Python sketch from 1967 that comes to mind when people ask a librarian for a book that doesn't exist.
They predicted the future.
Are you sure that's not pre-Python? Maybe one of David Frost's shows like At Last the 1948 Show or The Frost Report.
Marty Feldman (the customer) wasn't one of the Pythons, and the comments on the video suggest that Graham Chapman took on the customer role when the Pythons performed it. (Which, if they did, suggests that Cleese may have written it, in order for him to have been allowed to take it with him.)
Ahahahahaha one of the best I’ve seen thanks
Thanks for this, I hadn't seen this one!
It's always a treat to find a new Monty Python sketch. I hadn't seen this one either and had a good laugh
This and many other new problems are solved by applying reputation systems (like those banks use for your credit rating, or employers share with each other) in yet another direction. "This customer is an asshole, allocate less time for their requests and warn them that they have a bad history of demanding nonexistent books". Easy.
Then they'll talk with their friends how libraries are all possessed by a conspiracy, similarly to how similarly intelligent people talk about Jewish plot to take over the world, flat earth and such.
Its a fun problem trying to apply this to the while internet. I'm slowly adding sites with obvious generated blogs to Kagi but it's getting worse
Skill issue, just use the Library of Babel