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Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks

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Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks

#121

Post by post-it »

simonw wrote: post #11

Here's the prompt they used: Classify this claim as of : " " Output exactly one label: True, Mostly True, Misleading, or False. No explanations, no qualifiers. The claims look like this: https://lenz.io/research/llm-disagreement/data.csv I put that in Datasette Lite to make it easier to explore. Here's an example of a disagreement: https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.simonwil... The claim was "All alm…

Fwiw the two models that did have access to search disagreed with each other on the bombing one:

> 7.1 Model selection

> Five frontier models, chosen to cover two capability surfaces:

> Parametric (training-only): GPT-5.4 (OpenAI), Claude Opus 4.7 (Anthropic), Gemini 3 Pro (Google)

> Retrieval-augmented: Gemini 3 Pro + Search (Google), Sonar Pro (Perplexity)

Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks

#122

Post by Aurornis »

kostaj wrote: post #20
embedding-shape wrote: post #9

> These aren't benchmark items with public answer keys — they're claims real users submitted for verification to a fact-checking platform. Cool. I wonder if anything of this matters when the authors don't disclose exactly how much of their report was written and made with LLMs in the first place? There even is a "11. Ethics & data use" section, and the research is about LLMs being infallible in some ways, yet the usa…

Data collection and processing was done manually. LLMs helped with the report drafting. Everything was human reviewed before publishing.

> LLMs helped with the report drafting. Everything was human reviewed before publishing.

This is becoming the classic way of admitting an LLM wrote it.

Leaving that out of the report validated the complaint above.

Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks

#123

Post by kostaj »

simonw wrote: post #93
roxolotl wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we’re going to use LLMs as oracles I don’t think the prompt is unreasonable. They are being sold as geniuses and people are treating them as such especially given the characterization of AI in science fiction as overly correct. A perfect tool that has ”genius level intelligence” would answer correctly.

What's the correct answer for "During a private Saturday call, Democratic members of the United States House of Representatives from Virginia and Hakeem Jeffries discussed strategies after losing a redistricting case at the Supreme Court of Virginia, including trying to flip two or three Republican-held seats under the existing map."? You can only say True, False, Mostly True or Misleading. (And you're not allowed to…

Search was enabled for 2 of the 5 models -- Gemini and Sonar Pro. The disagreement between them is still high - different verdict on 42% of the claims. Fully agree, that some of those claims are hard to classify for a human as well -- the real-world messiness...

Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks

#124

Post by gcr »

kostaj wrote: post #99
daveguy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better options would have been "True", "False", "Unknown" (which opinions would fall under too). That also includes an interesting assessment of how well LLMs can identify missing information. My guess is they would be a very low number of "unknown" and a much higher level of agreement (assuming equal representation). Unless the RLHF techniques have gotten better at getting an LLM to say "I don't know", which I doubt…

Tried initially with a fifth bucket, Abstain. It was actually heavily used by some of the models. But it felt as if they are using this to "avoid" some of the hard questions, and we dropped this bucket to force them to provide a verdict.

Shouldn't that be part of the test?

Real-world systems need to be able to say "I don't know." This is a test about misinformation after all, and overconfident responses contribute to that.

Teasing out the difference between "avoid" and "unknown" could be a different research question

Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks

#125

Post by Alifatisk »

jawns wrote: post #103

"Extraterrestrial life exists somewhere in the universe." GPT-5.4: Misleading Opus 4.7: Misleading Gemini 3: FALSE Gemini 3 (Retrieval): FALSE Sonar Pro: FALSE It's a weird fact claim, because the ground truth is "nobody knows for sure" and that's not one of the available options.

Isn't misleading the correct option here then?

Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks

#126

Post by hombre_fatal »

simonw wrote: post #11

Here's the prompt they used: Classify this claim as of : " " Output exactly one label: True, Mostly True, Misleading, or False. No explanations, no qualifiers. The claims look like this: https://lenz.io/research/llm-disagreement/data.csv I put that in Datasette Lite to make it easier to explore. Here's an example of a disagreement: https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.simonwil... The claim was "All alm…

Yeah, scrolling through the examples, you have no idea where the models actually disagree on the underlying facts when it's just "X vs Mostly X" or "Mostly X vs Misleading" or "False vs Misleading". Or even True vs False -- without seeing the explanation, then I cannot necessarily compare two answers.

The study is about whether they said the same phrase which is a much weaker claim than people in the comments are reacting to.

Reminds me of this professor I had who thought it was epic to always respond to our questions with "it depends" before hashing out two very different but technically correct answers. It was obnoxious and he saw it as his tag line, but he had a point about nuance.

Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks

#127

Post by johnbarron »

kostaj wrote: post #2

Author here. 67% (95% CI 64–70%) of 1,000 recent real user claims to a fact-checking platform had at least one of GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 3 Pro+Search, and Sonar Pro dissent from the panel majority — or no majority formed at all. Panel-level Krippendorff's α (ordinal) = 0.639, i.e. nontrivial but limited agreement. Quick context on what's in the writeup and what isn't: - What's measured: parsed…

Thanks for posting here. Keep expanding and improving your study. Correct where it deserves correction.

The fact that HN decided to downvote the author of the study, shows how these people cant stay classy, and the mods stay silent...just shows what this is all about.

Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks

#128

Post by aftbit »

simonw wrote: post #114
afavour wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with what you’re saying the typical AI agent doesn’t say “I’m not totally sure about this, should I search the web?”. It often just spits out a reply based on its knowledge.

That was true a year ago, I don't think it's true today. I can't remember the last time I saw Claude or ChatGPT confidently answer a question that they should have searched for instead. If you watch their reasoning traces they often say things like "this is a well-known historical fact so I don't need to search for it", or more frequently they spit off a bunch of searches.

Anecdotally, it still happens a ton to me. They also still make super simple logic errors that they immediately reverse when pressed. For example, I asked Opus 4.7 last night how to cool off my room without making it too humid inside (indoor temp 78°F, humidity 45%; outdoor temp 64°F, humidity 99%). It suggested opening a window and assured me that the humidity would not rise above around 60% which would still be comfortable. I asked it to justify that and it said:

>You're absolutely right about the humidity — I was sloppy with that aside. If you ventilate enough to meaningfully cool the room, you're replacing indoor air with outdoor air wholesale, and you'd converge on outdoor conditions: 64°F and near-100% RH. That's miserable. The 55-60% figure I tossed out was hand-wavy nonsense — it would only hold if you barely cracked the window and mixed a tiny fraction of outdoor air in. At any ventilation rate that actually cools, you're just moving outside air inside.

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