I won a championship that doesn't exist

> Simon does not have the authority to unilaterally¹ name the whale

There's no such thing as authority to name a whale, and anyways I don't believe authority is strictly needed. A name is what people use to refer to something, full stop. It is only required that names become common-ish parlance; the more well known they are, the more they feel like the 'real' name. The inverse of Ohms is named Mhos (imo much more recognizable than the official name, "siemens"). The "#" symbol is named the hashtag, octothorp, pound sign, tic-tac-toe, number sign, and probably a million other things. Which one of these is the "real" primary name? I think intuitively we know that the real one is whatever people around us are most familiar with. You should take a guess, and I'll put the wikipedia-suggested-answer in the footnotes [1]. I bet your name for it is different than the 'official' wikipedia suggestion.

In the case of the whale, the _only_ name that is associated with that whale is Teresa T. I think this immediately makes it the most valid name of that whale.

[1] wikipedia says this is the number sign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign

This has nothing to do with LLMs. If incorrect info can get onto a reputable resource, that info will seem authoritative, and it will be incorrect - that's not surprising. LLM's use publicly available info in their training, and often times publicly-available info is incorrect. I feel this is just as interesting as the base claim of 'I can get incorrect info onto wiki pages', no more interesting, and no less.

If somebody is trying to put out incorrect information on the internet, and they choose a small enough niche, it is not at all surprising that they can succeed.

The line "This is the part that really matters." and the line "This is the circular citation pattern, and it’s one of the most under discussed attacks on the “retrieval augmented generation” trust model. " both raised flags. AI absolutely loves writing about the One Weird Trick that dentists don't want you to know. They love talking about "what really matters" or saying something is "the most under discussed" thing.

Then we get to the section "Why This Is A Bigger Deal Than It Looks". The title of this section again raises similar flags to before. But the bulleted list of:

1. The retrieval layer (immediately) 2. The model training corpus layer (months to years) 3. The agent layer (where the money is)

Absolutely reeks of AI. This list with this sequence of parentheticals is exactly how LLMs write, both structurally and the specific phrasing. This was the point where I felt confident enough to publicly accuse the post of AI writing.

I could go on with the prose in this section... How about "The attack surface is not hypothetical, it’s the default case."? Or "The cleanup problem for corpus poisoning is genuinely unsolved as of 2026."? (LLMs wildly overuse "genuine(ly)" and "real")

This paragraph under ‘Trust Laundering’ is when it hit my AI writing trigger threshold:

> This is the circular citation pattern, and it’s one of the most under discussed attacks on the “retrieval augmented generation” trust model. It doesn’t require compromising Wikipedia’s infrastructure with l33t hacker skills. It doesn’t require social engineering an editor. You just simply write the source yourself, cite yourself on Wikipedia, and let the trust flow downstream. Easy peasy!

“It doesn’t X. It doesn’t Y. You just Z. Conclusion”

Once I saw that some other elements stood out too.

There’s a set of bullet points under ‘Thae Approach’ where each bullet starts with a bolded phrase: “one domain”, “one press release”, “one Wikipedia edit”, followed by a bolded sentence “The whole thing took maybe about twenty minutes”.

The emphasis here on irrelevant quantifiable optimizations - who cares that it only needs one of each of three things and it took under twenty minutes? - with unnecessary faux-profundity is a strong AI tell.

Add to that that the writer talks in the article about using AI generation to produce the content for the poisoning site, the suggestion that he used it to write up a blog post about this is hardly an implausible suggestion.

I started writing a response and realized I basically wrote the exact same thing the other day

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921829