Librarians Are Tired of Being Accused of Hiding Secret Books That Were Made Up by AI
AI chatbots are generating fake titles that people insist are real.
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
It's a shit ouroboros, Randy!
garbage in, garbage out and back in again
the movie idiocracy was a prophecy that we were too arrogant to take seriously.
now go away, I'm baitin
It's new quantities, but an old mechanism, though. Humans were making up shit for all of history of talking.
In olden days it was resolved by trust and closed communities (hence various mystery cults in Antiquity, or freemasons in relatively recent times, or academia when it was a bit more protected).
Still doable and not a loss - after all, you are ultimately only talking to people anyway. One can build all the same systems on a F2F basis.
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.
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?
Grok, enhance this image
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Like a year ago adding “and don’t be racist” actually made the output less racist 🤷.
Problem is, LLMs are amazing the vast majority of the time. Especially if you're asking about something you're not educated or experienced with.
Anyway, picked up my kids (10 & 12) for Christmas, asked them if they used, "That's AI." to call something bullshit. Yep!
Especially if you're asking about something you're not educated or experienced with
That's the biggest problem for me. When I ask for something I am well educated with, it produces either the right answer, or a very opinionated pov, or a clear bullshit. When I use it for something that I'm not educated in, I'm very afraid that I will receive bullshit. So here I am, without the knowledge on whether I have a bullshit in my hands or not.
Problem is, LLMs are amazing the vast majority of the time. Especially if you’re asking about something you’re not educated or experienced with.
Don't you see the problem with that logic?
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 had to explain to three separate family members what it means for an Ai to hallucinate. The look of terror on their faces after is proof that people have no idea how "smart" a LLM chatbot is. They have been probably using one at work for a year thinking they are accurate.
Idk how anyone searches the internet anymore. Search engines all turn up so I ask an AI. Maybe one out of 20 times it turns up what I'm asking for better than a search engine. The rest of the time it runs me in circles that don't work and wastes hours. So then I go back to the search engine and find what I need buried 20 pages deep.
It's fucking awful isn't it. Summer day soon when i can be arsed I'll have to give one of the paid search engines a go.
I'm currently on qwant but I've already noticed a degradation in its results since i started using it at the start of the year.
Agreed. And the search engines returning AI generated pages masquerading as websites with real information is precisely why I spun up a searXNG instance. It actually helps a lot.
I've asked it for a solution to something and it gives me A. I tell it A doesn't work so it says "Of course!" and gives me B. Then I tell it B doesn't work and it gives me A...
The results I get from chatgpt half the time are pretty bad. If I ask for simple code it is pretty good but ask it about how something works? Nope. All I need to do is slightly rephrase the question and I can get a totally different answer.
I have a friend who constantly sends me videos that get her all riled up. Half the time I patiently explain to her why a video is likely AI or faked some other way. "Notice how it never says where it is taking place? Notice how they never give any specific names?" Fortunately she eventually agrees with me but I feel like I'm teaching critical thinking 101. I then think of the really stupid people out there who refuse to listen to reason.
I'm not using LLMs often, but I haven't had a single clean example of hallucination for 6 months already. This recursive calls work I incline to believe
I got hallucination from trying to find a book I read but didn't know the title of. And hallucinated NBA play off results of the wrong team winning. And gotten basic math calculations wrong.
Its a language model so its purpose is to string together words that sound like sentences, but it can't be fully trusted to be accurate. Best it can do is give you source so you can got straight to the resource to read that instead.
It's decent at generating basic code, and testing yourself to see if it outputs what you want. But I don't trust it as a resource when it comes to information when even wrong sports facts have been provided.
No AI needed for that. These bloody librarians wouldn't let us have the Necronomicon either. Selfish bastards...
Am librarian. Here you go
This one is on you. MY copy of the necronomicon firmly sits in my library in the west wing...
it sits on whatever shelf it sees fit to sit on, on any given day.
Well maybe if people could just say the three words right, they wouldn't need to.
The Simpsons showed us the danger of the occult section in the library.
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.)
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
Ahahahahaha one of the best I’ve seen thanks
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.
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.
I guess Thomas Fullman was right: "When humans find wisdom in cold replicas of themselves, the arrow of evolution will bend into a circle". That's from Automating the Mind. One of his best.
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 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
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.
Everybody knows the world is full of stupid people.
I read that as libertarians at first and wasn't even fased. We all know Ayn Rand was secretly a machine.
Every time I think people have reached maximum stupidity they prove me wrong.
