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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

#71

Post by Gigachad »

crazygringo wrote: post #55
Gigachad wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not just robots.txt, if you've tried using a VPN lately, so many sites like reddit/youtube/etc block you from viewing content until you log in. Every major website is getting anti scraping tech in the last year. Even archive.org is getting blocked from more and more sites since it can be used for indirect scraping of sites.

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

#72

Post by lm28469 »

Lerc wrote: post #10
furyofantares wrote: post #6

I think this is a serious issue, but I gotta say > one of the most basic tasks: distinguishing facts from falsehoods I do not think that is a basic task!

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.

The thing that makes a statistical average of human written opinions will automatically become an oracle of truth? Through what mechanism exactly?

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

#73

Post by lm28469 »

simianwords wrote: post #39
crooked-v wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 veri…

Yeah it also makes cute errors praising Hitler &co. It seems like it's a fairly objective and factual bot as long as you're leaning on the same side as musk

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

#74

Post by jrflowers »

simonw wrote: post #61
jrflowers wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

But what's an "incident"? There is an enormous difference between "35% of times a user asks a question about news" and "35% of the time against our deliberately hand-picked collection of test questions that we have not published".

>what's an "incident"?

Those are valid questions.

I simply found the phrasing “[quote of a sentence saying 35% of the time]. 35% of what?” to be funny because you would either have to not read the sentence you pasted or be an English speaker that does not understand what “% of the time” means.

I personally didn’t download the study linked in the article. It is interesting that they (must have, I’m assuming) did not include anything about their methodology in this study since they usually do with other things they publish.

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

#75

Post by zdragnar »

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?

It's hardly even a polite ask. It's literally a text file. Automated http clients, such as search engine indexers (Google, yahoo, etc) are expected to use it to know what pages can be visited or not. That expectation is nothing more than a convention.

If you are on a Mac or Linux computer, odds are it has a program called curl pre-installed. If you type in curl website address in a terminal, it'll fetch make a request and download the response. Robot.txt never gets involved. Same is true for AI agents and search engines that aren't polite.

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

#76

Post by simianwords »

lm28469 wrote: post #73
simianwords wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 veri…

Yeah it also makes cute errors praising Hitler &co. It seems like it's a fairly objective and factual bot as long as you're leaning on the same side as musk

Can you show more examples where it fails other than the obvious error that was admitted by them and fixed quickly?

Of course this is just anecdotal - you will be able to find some bad examples but I'm still interested to know what you consider as errors.

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

#77

Post by simianwords »

ehnto wrote: post #67
simianwords wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To support my claims, here is a typical example: https://x.com/vlastimilve/status/1967187345641558272?s=46 I didn’t cherry pick it because obviously it’s not that impressive. But it works - it is professional and gives as much information as it can be confident giving. You said you can influence it etc but clearly it is hard. Sure it is not perfect but I find that it helps reducing fake news if anything. You are righ…

It's possible I'm blocking the AI widget as I don't see it, is it Grok replying with a fact check of the claim? I think that is good in general, I do, I am just weary that it is still shakey ground. The company behind Grok has clear incentives to influence the output of those fact checks as one example. I am also weary of it always eventually conforming to the vox populi as it ingests the internet firehouse. Leading…

Yes it is replying with a fact check and doing it professionally.

>I am also weary of it always eventually conforming to the vox populi as it ingests the internet firehouse. Leading to the loudest, most prolific voices thus views always being more represented.

I'm okay with this. This is exactly what I want - what the world has converged on as the correct answer. Spreading what is already what the world has converged on is not what I would consider "false information".

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

#78

Post by simonw »

jrflowers wrote: post #74
simonw wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's an "incident"? There is an enormous difference between "35% of times a user asks a question about news" and "35% of the time against our deliberately hand-picked collection of test questions that we have not published".

>what's an "incident"? Those are valid questions. I simply found the phrasing “[quote of a sentence saying 35% of the time]. 35% of what?” to be funny because you would either have to not read the sentence you pasted or be an English speaker that does not understand what “% of the time” means. I personally didn’t download the study linked in the article. It is interesting that they (must have, I’m assuming) did not i…

"... of the time" is ambiguous if you don't describe what "the time" is referring to.

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

#80

Post by lm28469 »

simianwords wrote: post #76
lm28469 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it also makes cute errors praising Hitler &co. It seems like it's a fairly objective and factual bot as long as you're leaning on the same side as musk

Can you show more examples where it fails other than the obvious error that was admitted by them and fixed quickly? Of course this is just anecdotal - you will be able to find some bad examples but I'm still interested to know what you consider as errors.

It would only be capable of truth on subjects with a large consensus, everything else is biased or hallucinated, it's so obvious that grok is being aligned to musk's world view, you're free to think like musk but it's not some kind of god given truth.

How is a statistical model going to come up with The Truth exactly ? It's all based on existing material, at best you'll get the statistical average of what people wrote about the topic, it's cool if you're asking about the color of tomatoes or the shape of bananas, but now people are using these tools to get The Truth about news or politics

https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/false-claims-about-gaza-pho...

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/7/11/as-millions-adop...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-does-the-ai-powere...

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/06/26/elon-musks-ai-...

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250602-hey-chatbot-i...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/05/24/grok-mu...

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/17/groks-white-genocide-respons...

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