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AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

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Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#31

Post by Lerc »

jrflowers wrote: post #25
simonw wrote: post #15

I'm a bit suspicious of this report - they don't reveal nearly enough about their methodology for me to evaluate how credible this is. When it says "The 10 leading AI tools repeated false information on topics in the news more than one third of the time — 35 percent — in August 2025, up from 18 percent in August 2024" - 35% of what ? Their previous 2024 report refused to even distinguish between different tools - mix…

>35% of what? Well it says 35% of the time so I would guess that they’re talking about the number of incidents in a given time frame. For example if you asked me what color the sky is ten times and I said “carrot” four times, you could say that my answer is “carrot” 40% of the time

And if you said azure, cerulean, or black.

Are they correct answers or not?

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#32

Post by selcuka »

simonw wrote: post #22
blibble wrote: post #5

every major news org now blocks the parasitic "AI" crawlers examples: https://www.bbc.co.uk/robots.txt https://www.cnn.com/robots.txt https://www.nbcnews.com/robots.txt all they will be training on now is spam anyone that says "AI is the worst today it will ever be", no because that was before the world reacted to it

They seem to still be allowing Google to crawl them, unsurprisingly. Advantage Gemini.

No, they explicitly block Gemini as well:

    User-agent: Google-Extended
    Disallow: /
Gemini still uses the same user agent, but it has a different robots.txt entry (Google-Extended) [1]:

> Google-Extended is a standalone product token that web publishers can use to manage whether content Google crawls from their sites may be used for training future generations of Gemini models that power Gemini Apps and Vertex AI API for Gemini and for grounding (providing content from the Google Search index to the model at prompt time to improve factuality and relevancy) in Gemini Apps and Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI.

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#33

Post by AstroBen »

Analemma_ wrote: post #30
faangguyindia wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is when AGI comes into existence and breaks out of labs to become our masters. Those who opposed AI adoption will be the first who will be sent to labor camps. I want to be in good books of AGI masters, so i am helping apply AI everywhere.

This is pretty much word-for-word the reasoning behind Roko’s basilisk, which made its proponents an internet laughingstock for a decade, but is a surprisingly tricky thing to actually refute if you accept the premise that AGI is in fact coming.

It seems quite easy to refute—why would it punish anyone?

We would pose 0 threat at that point to any super intelligence, and I highly doubt it would have anything like a human grudge. It's just a case of anthropomorphizing it

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#34

Post by selcuka »

blibble wrote: post #13
AstroBen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They torrented a shitload of books illegally and trained on them.. but they're unable to get past The Great Wall of robots.txt?

I doubt it's their only countermeasure plus it's a pretty dangerous game for them to play against large, powerful actors with legions of lawyers

> plus it's a pretty dangerous game for them to play against large, powerful actors with legions of lawyers

Like book publishers?

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#35

Post by crooked-v »

simianwords wrote: post #28

Why does this post not take into account the other side of it? AI has helped me become more grounded and correct in a lot of areas. Intricate questions are now easily answered in ChatGPT. Not only that - grok use in twitter works surprisingly well. Can some one really quantify the effect it has had in countering fake news? It is now way harder to spread fake news on X because a simple grok tag can counter it.

How do you know that those easy answers are reliably correct, though?

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#37

Post by bmitc »

simonw wrote: post #15

I'm a bit suspicious of this report - they don't reveal nearly enough about their methodology for me to evaluate how credible this is. When it says "The 10 leading AI tools repeated false information on topics in the news more than one third of the time — 35 percent — in August 2025, up from 18 percent in August 2024" - 35% of what ? Their previous 2024 report refused to even distinguish between different tools - mix…

Just go on Facebook. Greater than 90% of ads and linked articles are AI generated falsehoods.

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#38

Post by Lerc »

strangattractor wrote: post #24
Lerc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is definitely not a basic task. A lot of humans have trouble with it. It is one of the areas that I think AI can overtake human ability, given time.

Question Let's just assume that AI works in some fundamental way similar to human intelligence works. Would it be likely that the AI would suffer from some of the same problems as people? Hallucinations, Obsequiousness etc IMO One of the computer's characteristics that make it useful is that it doesn't suffer from human behavior anomalies. I would also say that differentiating truthiness from falseness is pretty fund…

If the current designs are on the path to AGI and they can do what human intelligence does. I think the capabilities will be much greater than a human of the same reasoning ability. There are already a lot of areas where it is undeniable that their abilities are better than a humans. Right now they are poor reasoners with a vast store of knowledge, that probably creates the illusion of a greater capability for reasoning than they actually have.

If they do arrive at human level reasoning, it is unlikely that the path to doing so will require sacrificing that vast knowledge base.

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#39

Post by simianwords »

crooked-v wrote: post #35
simianwords wrote: post #28

Why does this post not take into account the other side of it? AI has helped me become more grounded and correct in a lot of areas. Intricate questions are now easily answered in ChatGPT. Not only that - grok use in twitter works surprisingly well. Can some one really quantify the effect it has had in countering fake news? It is now way harder to spread fake news on X because a simple grok tag can counter it.

How do you know that those easy answers are reliably correct, though?

It provides sources that you can look up if you are using it in the app. But in twitter: the simple fact that a lot of people don't seem to understand is that AI is actually really factually accurate - way more than you can expect from a normal person.

I have seen very very few egregious errors from Grok and most of the factually incorrect posts seem to be caught by it. For the ones that I Grok was incorrect - I verified it myself and I was wrong and Grok was right.

It turns out that Grok is actually really reliable. But the limitations are that it can't fact check extremely niche topics or intricate posts. But 90% of the cases it does catch them.

Edit: it also makes cute errors like this sometimes https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-buzz/grok-ai-mistak...

Re: AI False information rate for news nearly doubles in one year

#40

Post by macintux »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #19
faangguyindia wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is when AGI comes into existence and breaks out of labs to become our masters. Those who opposed AI adoption will be the first who will be sent to labor camps. I want to be in good books of AGI masters, so i am helping apply AI everywhere.

> Those who opposed AI adoption will be the first who will be sent to labor camps. I know you're joking, but other people are serious about this. Why do they think that an AGI will be vengeful? So strange.

Reminds me of Bruce Wayne from the dreadful DC film.

> He has the power to wipe out the entire human race, and if we believe there's even a one percent chance that he is our enemy we have to take it as an absolute certainty... and we have to destroy him.

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