Why do we want to build intelligence if it just confirms what we already think we know?
Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks
271–280 of 377 posts
Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks
#272Here'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…
This is not how people use LLMs. If you ask one of these questions you’d get a longer answer, often grounded on the internet. I speculate that conditional on a smart human operator interpreting the results, such interpretations across vendors converge more often than this report makes it seem.
Even then, there can often be substantive disagreements based on context. Hence the need for even a mostly true or mostly false bucket.
Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Teams I work with use the abstain rate to flag what goes to a human. Disagreement between models is the same idea. Your 67% is what makes "two cheap models, escalate when they fight" actually work. Without abstain it mostly looks like noise.
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Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks
#274Sounds like a lot of room for human bias.
How would it have responded to these claims in the past:
THALIDOMIDE is safe
CIGARETTES are safe
ASBESTOS is safe
MERCURY is safe
DDT is safe
LEAD in gasoline is safe
Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks
#275[flagged]
Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks
#276What’s the point of this if they didn’t use temperature=0 for every model (they didn’t)?
They could have redone the test against the same model and gotten different answers. It’s almost like picking 2 different coins and comparing the list of coin flip results. (I realize it’s not that straightforward, it’s not 50/50, but it’s essentially the same issue.)
Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without providing definitions of "True / Mostly True / Misleading / False" to each rater, I rate the article's claim that "Only one verdict bucket can be correct per claim" as false . Something can be simultaneously "misleading" and either true or false. Which category should something go in if it's "mostly false"? How much can something be wrong before it goes from "mostly true" to "false" (objectively, both have so…
>Something can be simultaneously "misleading" and either true or false. Which category should something go in if it's "mostly false"? Disagree. The definition of misleading is a true fact that is presented in a way to lead you to a false conclusion. Example: "Most good engineers are male". It is true as a consequence of most engineers being male in general, but it leads the reader to a potential false implication tha…
> The definition of misleading is a true fact that is presented in a way to lead you to a false conclusion.
According to Merriem-Webster, which defines "mislead" as the following:
1. (transitive verb) to lead in a wrong direction or into a mistaken action or belief often by deliberate deceit
2. (intransitive verb) to lead astray; give a wrong impression
Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't misleading the correct option here then?
No, "misleading" is a statement that is used because it suggests something else. It's a curious category because, differently from true and false, it's not about the statement itself but rather the intention behind its usage or the way it might be understood. It's frankly more of a political judgement than a matter of facts.
"Shark attacks correlate strongly with ice cream sales" is an entirely true statement that some would argue is also misleading.
Misleading should be removed as a category and replaced with a better hedge like "not sure"
Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks
#279"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?
The prompt in this study didn't specify what does the Misleading label mean, so the interpretation varies between the models.
I mean look at the other responses here from the HN commenters. There's lots of nuance in there.
Re: Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks
#280I hate to get really pedantic here, but the concept of "truth claims" plays fast and loose with concept of knowledge in a philosophical sense. The idea of "fact checks" misunderstand how information and knowledge work together. Knowledge is about evidence, not "facts" because facts are a shorthand for a preponderance of evidence.
I feel we are doomed to debate the veracity of Wikipedia on a loop, forever, because people don't understand that Wikipedia exists as a place to find citations not as a place to find facts. Yes, those stated facts may disagree with the citations, but even if we try to fix that issue by having experts write the encyclopedia, we still suffer from the problem that the experts are often wrong.
We need a view of knowledge's relationship to LLMs that is based in Karl Popper's idea of falsifiablity. We should ask LLMs for evidence of claims not for truth values. Truth values are foundational to deductive systems, where axioms define truth. In inductive systems, like the real world, the concept of black swan events means that truth values are never fixed and are always in a state of uncertainty.
I honestly think it would be helpful going forward if we add some basic philosophical education to the standard curriculum, because no that we have an artificial form of information retrieval, we need to be much, much more pedantic about how we interpret that information.