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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

#51

Post by simianwords »

AstroBen wrote: post #7
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 torrented a shitload of books illegally and trained on them.. but they're unable to get past The Great Wall of robots.txt?

robots.txt prevents real time search use for grounding and citations.

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

#52

Post by wenbin »

what wrote: post #48
wenbin wrote: post #16

AI will create ever more AI-generated synthetic content because current systems still can't determine with 100% certainty whether a piece of content was produced by AI. And AIs will, intentionally or unintentionally, train on synthetic content produced by other AIs. AI generators don't have a strong incentive to add watermarks to synthetic content. They also don't provide reliable AI-detection tools (or any tools at…

I’d be kind of surprised if they don’t watermark the content they generate. Just so they don’t train on their own slop.

Maybe some of them already embed some simple, secret marker to identify their own generated content. But people outside the organization wouldn’t know. And this still can’t prevent other companies from training models on synthetic data.

Once synthetic data becomes pervasive, it’s inevitable that some of it will end up in the training process. Then it’ll be interesting to see how the information world evolves: AI-generated content built on synthetic data produced by other AIs. Over time, people may trust AI-generated content less and less.

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

#53

Post by ehnto »

simianwords wrote: post #43
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.

I routinely use AI to fact check claims and it works extremely well.

How would you know, generally speaking? Factuality online is always subjective, based on a thing someone said, or that you observed, and you are putting trust in the source. Whether you googled it, or AI googled it and generated an explanation, you are trusting the source.

You can influence it so easily with your inputs as well. You could easily, accidentally point it's search toward the searches someone is more likely to be aligned with, but may not actually be fact.

Especially as AI providers implement long term memory or reflections on historic chats, your bias will very strongly influence outcomes of fact checking.

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

#54

Post by crazygringo »

simianwords wrote: post #51
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?

robots.txt prevents real time search use for grounding and citations.

No it doesn't. It has zero legal force. Or any technical force either.

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

#55

Post by crazygringo »

Gigachad wrote: post #46
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?

If the AI crawlers circumvent the protection mechanisms it's a serious crime now rather than just "Well it was on the open internet for free". Wouldn't surprise me if the the news orgs are also looking at honeypot articles to see if the fake details slip in to LLMs.

It's not a serious crime, or any crime at all, to ignore robots.txt. It's entirely voluntary whether you want to follow it or not. If you don't, you're being a dick maybe, but that's not a crime.

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

#56

Post by simianwords »

ehnto wrote: post #53
simianwords wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I routinely use AI to fact check claims and it works extremely well.

How would you know, generally speaking? Factuality online is always subjective, based on a thing someone said, or that you observed, and you are putting trust in the source. Whether you googled it, or AI googled it and generated an explanation, you are trusting the source. You can influence it so easily with your inputs as well. You could easily, accidentally point it's search toward the searches someone is more like…

These are good caveats and questions worth asking. But it doesn't take away my main point - grok is useful in countering false claims and it is accurate very frequently.

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

#57

Post by simianwords »

crazygringo wrote: post #54
simianwords wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

robots.txt prevents real time search use for grounding and citations.

No it doesn't. It has zero legal force. Or any technical force either.

Not an expert so I ask: no technical force either? Is it just a polite ask then?

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

#58

Post by crazygringo »

simianwords wrote: post #57
crazygringo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. It has zero legal force. Or any technical force either.

Not an expert so I ask: no technical force either? Is it just a polite ask then?

Correct. Literally just a polite ask.

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

#59

Post by mallowdram »

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…

News narratives are neither random, nor specific, they are arbitrary. There is nothing really accurate about any narrative. The idea we rely on the news for things other than immediate survival is somewhat bizarre. In effect, AI's role is make narratives even more arbitrary and force us to develop a format that replaces them, and by nature, is unable to be automated at the same time.

We should welcome AI into the system in order to destroy it and then recognize AI is purely for entertainment purposes.

“Flawed stories of the past shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future. Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative.” Daniel Kahnemann Thinking Fast and Slow

“The same science that reveals why we view the world through the lens of narrative also shows that the lens not only distorts what we see but is the source of illusions we can neither shake nor even correct for…all narratives are wrong, uncovering what bedevils all narrative is crucial for the future of humanity.” Alex Rosenberg How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories 2018

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

#60

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

AstroBen wrote: post #33
Analemma_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The premise is that it's trying to influence human behavior before it becomes powerful by punishing them afterwards. Like how part of the reason you give the guy a ticket is to substantiate the disincentive for the speeding he already did. It's not an emotional thing.

What's sketchy is that you and it come to this arrangement without communicating. Because you are confident this thing that has total power over you will come into existence and will have wanted something of you now, you're meant to have entered a contract. This is suspect and I think falls prey to the critiques of Pascal's wager- there are infinite things superintelligence might want. But it's certainly tricky.

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