Check Your Fucking Sources, People

(brodzinski.com)

55 points | by flail 2 hours ago

15 comments

  • louiereederson 1 hour ago
    Late last year I tried asking ChatGPT to summarize a collection of 10 researchers' views/findings on a topic and provide representative quotes. It initially looked plausible but when I checked the links, the quotes were from clearly AI generated summaries of actual interviews. The paraphrasing was also plausible but subtly and profoundly incorrect.

    I haven't tested this again on the latest models though, so not sure if there's been an improvement.

    • Kim_Bruning 4 minutes ago
      ChatGPT is horrible overall, for sure, but how exactly did you ask it to summarize? You're still dealing with a machine; it's not magic. The exact flow of information is important. (Also, what quarter of last year? The builders are iterating rapidly and are both catching and creating new bugs at a silly rate.)
    • mountainb 36 minutes ago
      That's more or less how it works. To actually have the system carry out your intention it would have to use significant hardware resources (and even then who knows if it would actually work). Alternatively you would need to break up the work into chunks that the hardware allocated to you by the system would not be overwhelmed.

      A lot of people don't realize this because the work that they are having the AI do does not need to be either true or false. It just has to output media that seems like it fits. The system probably took many shortcuts to keep the resource use low while outputting something plausible but false.

      And frankly this is sort of fine as long as you know what it's doing and what the limitations are. Hypothetically if you broke up the task into multiple steps that the system can actually ingest properly it might reduce the time that the task took overall, maybe even significantly, but not down to one prompt.

  • arjie 39 minutes ago
    You always have to check your sources because citation laundering is a thing[0].

    In addition, most mainstream[1] journalists cite sources in a more liberal way than a scientist should so the source might not say what the journalist reports. The Atlantic has a bit on Waymo’s poor detection of minorities[2], e.g.

    0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-17/Citogenesis

    1: Some independent reporters like Matt Yglesias are more rigorous, though their direct reporting can still be bogus

    2: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/no-waymos-arent-racist

  • SllX 57 minutes ago
    > Not Sweden, but one Swedish startup.

    Just as an aside jumping off this sentence from the article, I am far less tolerant of the practice of naming countries of origin or general locales rather than specific organizations in headlines and stories.

    Name the organization, and if you want to in the body, name where they’re from/located/operating as it pertains to the organization. For that matter, if you can offer information on the specific locale (Sweden is a big place after all), you should also do that unless it really is something more national/international.

    • TZubiri 26 minutes ago
      There's even arguments for doing this even for cases where the actual state entity did something.

      "The US did X" The president? The senate? A federal, or municipal body? etc..

      But there's arguments against, if "The US bans automatic rifles" then to some extent it's clear what part of the US did it, to some other extent, it doesn't matter, and to some other extent, the part of the country that did the thing represents the whole country by corporization or democritazation.

      In History it's very common to say Country did thing, "Germany invaded Poland", "Argentina signed the Roca-Runceman pact" and so on... Possibly because (in addition to the reasons stated above) information needs to be compressed more for the past, we have less space and priority for details of the past than we do for the present, a kind of cold-hot storage mechanism

  • Upvoter33 20 minutes ago
    "Links No Longer Mean Credibility" - did they used to? I mean, I mostly agree with this article but a person could have written this about the internet. I remember people linking to all sorts of random web pages and using that as a source of credibility.
  • vslira 51 minutes ago
    People like to blame social media for this kind of bullshit, but social media is just the vector.

    Just this week I read a "study" because someone claimed on social media that it was made by (Public, famous) Unis A, B and C and reported as an effect an increase in 30% of revenue for the companies that participated in the experiment.

    The "study" was commissioned by an interest group (bad sign). It was conducted by people associated with said unis (I didn't check their credentials), and it did report in its headline the 30% revenue increase.

    Said study was about an experiment that ran for a few months. Within these months, the revenue was flat (which could be considered good enough for the cause). The 30% was the revenue of this period against the same period the previous year. So somehow the experiment affected the companies retroactively! Not to mention that the researchers were able to find a group of companies that were, on average, growing 30% YoY. Surprising indeed.

    So even if you check your sources, it may still be bullshit science or bullshit reporting from well-credentialed sources.

    • dugidugout 27 minutes ago
      Why not link the study?
      • irishcoffee 15 minutes ago
        Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Spreading fake news isn't great. People also want you to prove what you say is true.
  • andai 23 minutes ago
    When Bard (now known as Gemini) first came out in Europe, I think mid 2023, I tested it out. AI search was still a new thing in those days, and I was excited to see what Google's solution would be like. I had high hopes.

    I asked it a question I knew the answer to. It searched the web, and told me the opposite of the truth. (Not nonsense, but a logical inversion of the actual fact. A common failure mode with earlier LLMs.)

    Puzzled, I checked the sources. It cited two. Both AI SEO slop.

    Bizarrely, I Googled it myself and couldn't even find those pages on Google. Maybe it was using a different search engine? ;)

  • RajT88 1 hour ago
    Facebook, ever the wasteland of bullshit and scams, has gotten even more bullshit and scammy in the AI era.

    I have found the single best way to avoid being pissed off by this shit is to just avoid Facebook. It dramatically cuts down on the amount I am exposed to.

    I also run with adblockers, and consume news via brutalist.report, which also helps. (I avoid the Fox News section at the bottom)

    • princevegeta89 49 minutes ago
      Not just Facebook, but also make sure to avoid TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, along with YouTube Shorts. Many of them are just nothing but fake AI content, and these days people are using AI to create fake profiles of good-looking, cute girls doing impossible things or actually showing off their bodies, and so on. At least 50% of what you see on your feed should be considered AI-generated content.

      I would say save your time and energy, and invest that into something else - forget all this social media.

      • ourmandave 21 minutes ago
        My favorite is the 83-year-old AI grandma on youtube giving retirement advice. They put her in various settings and she looks and sounds very real.

        The only obvious tell is the eyes don't track right. But once they fix that, it's really going to be hard to know.

        All the comments are how great her advice is, etc.

        Every video has a link to a book she "wrote" on amazon. I didn't waste my time trying to figure out what the scam is.

      • RajT88 26 minutes ago
        I don't do TikTok. My instagram feed doesn't seem too bad by comparison.

        Youtube shorts also seem OK for me, but of course definitely elevated compared to regular videos recommended to me.

        Lastly:

        > I would say save your time and energy, and invest that into something else - forget all this social media.

        Agree. The promise of social media hasn't worked out. It was nice during the early Netflix streaming days, but has gotten progressively worse since then.

  • wing-_-nuts 1 hour ago
    Ironically, 'source checking' is something AI is quite good at.
    • flail 1 hour ago
      There's nuance to that. An LLM is quite capable of suggesting relevant reading, given the context. Especially when the context is broad enough that there's enough training data.

      "Find me research on code reviews, their size, and quality" would give you more than enough reading. Yet, if you start with a claim, like "Longer PRs mean worse defect detection," the relevant data points fall to few enough for AI to start hallucinating.

      You get "something, something, PR length, defect detection, IDK, I don't read research papers." Such output is fine as long as the author cares to validate it.

      Skip the second step, and you might be good if you ask about something generic, like "What's the Slack story?" or "How did Blockbuster go bust?" Ask about some specific details, though, and you're bound to end up with made-up stuff that sounds just about right, while it's actually wrong.

      • throw310822 1 hour ago
        Checking is different from finding, though. Source checking means just "verify that this information is actually present in that document". Much harder to hallucinate in this case.
        • Kim_Bruning 43 minutes ago
          A quick smoke check takes just a few minutes.

          "Follow each link in this document. Read each link's contents against the contents in this document. Create a report: for each link list a working hyperlink, whether it exists, what claim it supports, whether it supports or fails to support it, and why"

          If it returns a report claiming all correct? That's promising, but human verification is important. You've got a list of hyperlinks, and a list of claims; so you can click each with middle-mouse, Ctrl-F 'till you find the point, and close the tab when you do.

          If you find any discrepancies ? Your initial prompt was malformed and/or you picked the wrong LLM, the wrong human, or possibly all three. Whatever the way, the results are built on quicksand; you'll need to start over.

          If no sources are provided? Well now: "If there ain't no sources it never happened."

          Compare double-entry bookkeeping. It needs to all add up. If you're 1 cent off, that means something is broken. Idem if a single reference is off, it polluted the context. (This works for human-generated and hybrid documents too. Polluted reasoning is polluted reasoning. The process is what counts.)

          • throw310822 20 minutes ago
            I would love to do it at scale on many online publications, and publish the results. That would teach 'em.
    • Thrymr 17 minutes ago
      I mostly disagree with this. You can request sources, you can ask it to check, but no LLM I have used can do this correctly more than 50-75% of the time, and some of the major models are extremely bad at this: giving broken links 90% of the time, incapable of giving actual links rather than search engine links, etc. Constant supervision and repetition of requests can sometimes get results, but it is exhausting. The "sources" it finds are often Reddit posts or other questionable secondary or tertiary sources, not actual original sources.
    • kakugawa 1 hour ago
      Have we forgotten how bad LLMs were at citing sources when they first came out? So, we had to build a lot of structure (harness engineering) and frontier labs had to do specific training to try to compensate for this.

      So, LLMs are inherently bad at citing sources. A lot of effort has been put in to improve this behavior, but it's compensating for an inherent flaw.

      • Kim_Bruning 8 minutes ago
        Huh? Oh! Are you treating the LLM as an oracle box?

        If you're not, ignore I said the following, and please tell me what you're seeing that's going wrong (and with what models!).

        Models weights are like Wikipedia. A nice starting point, but should never be referenced directly. Have your agent actually go out onto the internet and do the research. Now the actual references will be in your agent's actual Context (memory), so then it'd be very surprising if they don't get cited correctly.

        The one remaining challenge is if for some reason it goes through the motions but doesn't actually read a source, which is a corner case failure mode I've encountered.

    • 1970-01-01 38 minutes ago
      I disagree. It is a bullshit machine all the way to the core. LLMs in my world fail to cite full sources and consistently conclude with guesses as facts. It does this much more than an average journalist or reporter would. Only when you double-check it will it then apologize and correct itself.
    • oulipo2 50 minutes ago
      Judging by the number of scientific papers that have been outed as AI-generated, precisely because it hallucinated sources, it's not
    • 6stringmerc 1 hour ago
      Citation needed, please
      • wing-_-nuts 46 minutes ago
        Personal experience? You ask it for the name of the paper referenced. You google that paper (for some reason it's not great at going out and acquiring the paper). You then upload the pdf and ask it if the paper supports the assertion if it's not quickly findable via ^F. You go read, ask it clarifying questions about hazard ratios, what they controlled for, etc.

        AI is quite good when grounded in a source.

  • TZubiri 32 minutes ago
    >A clearly AI-generated image didn’t help the credibility (a three-legged crow is quite telling)

    Actually I checked some sources, and I found some for three-legged crows:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kojiki#The_Nakatsumaki_(%E4%B8...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-legged_crow#/media/File:...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Douze_emblemes_des_rites_...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chengdu_2007_341.jpg

    And by refuting this article, I thereby prove that which it sought to refute.

  • ekianjo 1 hour ago
    > Links No Longer Mean Credibility

    They never did!

    • flail 1 hour ago
      Ultimate credibility? Sure, they never did. Yet the whole thing Google was built upon was using links as tokens of credibility.

      You'd assume an outgoing link from a CNN website has more credibility than one from an anonymous blog. That is, I reckon, still true. Although the credibility either link conveys is degrading. Again, it has been so since we started playing the game of SEO, yet AI-generated content in this context is basically a weapon of mass destruction. The deterioration has sped up dramatically.

  • AlienRobot 6 minutes ago
    The way it works, has always worked, and should always work, is that you read some information on article X, and you just quote it as verbatim as linguistically possible. Nobody, literally nobody, reading your articles wants you to paraphrase it. If you don't quote things verbatim, you are doing it wrong. If you don't have sources, you are making it up. Your job is essentially just putting N+1 quotes from other articles into your article, and nobody wants you to do more or less than this.

    People just have a fundamentally misguided idea of what they should be doing. You just quote. That is all. Nobody needs your originality as a writer. They just want the quotes, the sources, and, optionally, a synthesis, conclusion, and summary. That is the "work" you need to do and if you do just this, that is enough value already even if it feels like plagiarism by people who don't know what the word plagiarism means.

    Everyone knows information came from somewhere. Where did you read it? We all know you didn't just wake up one day and remembered it from a past life or something like that. Why are you trying to pretend you just know it? Where are the links? Where are the screenshots?

    If you are giving people the sources that you should have been giving all along, in the correct way, then you don't need to "check your sources." Because "your sources" are literally where you got that information from in first place, so you have already checked them.

    Hence, if ChatGPT gave you a source, then your source isn't the source that ChatGPT gave you, because you didn't read it. Your source is, literally, ChatGPT. You should be writing "Smith, 2015, as cited by ChatGPT." Because you didn't read Smith, 2015. You read ChatGPT!

  • throw310822 1 hour ago
    > Ops, the link doesn’t lead to the study, but to another article. But that article, in turn, has a link of its own. Which leads to yet another article that doesn’t even mention the study anymore.

    This is a common, infuriating practice: provides a veneer of authoritativeness and credibility to newspaper articles, and who is ever going to click on the links that support those very cogent claims? Nobody of course, so they just link to another article with more vague claims, and at any further level deep your willingness to verify that information evaporates at the same rate as the information itself.

    But hey, in the meanwhile the author has managed to sneak in that "scientists have found" and that if you don't believe it you must be anti-science.

    Incidentally, highlighting this abuse (together with a bunch of other quality and fact-checking) would be a great use of AI on online news publication.

  • tinfoilhatter 1 hour ago
    It's amazing that people think Snopes or other "fact-checkers" are reliable sources of information and represent ultimate truth, as if they're immune to bias and don't receive funding from people / organizations with their own agendas.
    • ubertaco 1 hour ago
      Snopes (like anywhere) is only as reliable as its track record of collecting firsthand sources and accurately reporting on their contents.

      Which is to say: pretty good so far, in their case. For the future? Who knows. But they've done well up to now, at least.

      • tinfoilhatter 58 minutes ago
        Actually no, their track record is not great: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snopes#2010s
        • larkost 9 minutes ago
          Is this a meta-joke about links that don't prove what they are supposed to? If so, I don't really get it.

          Most of the 2010s section is about some drama about managers/hosters. The only thing that is even remotely applicable is they fact checking a satirical website, and needing to add a "Labeled Satire" tag to clear up confusion around the intensions of the linked site (as opposed to combating people who use the article as an argument without labeling it as such).

    • wat10000 1 hour ago
      They are generally quite good, and they provide ample background info for you to replicate (or repudiate) their findings on your own if you're so inclined.

      What's amazing is that people think Snopes or other fact-checkers are automatically wrong. I assume this comes from people who make a habit of believing bullshit and can't handle being corrected.

  • surebeli 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • 6stringmerc 1 hour ago
    Also relevant: the derision and mockery directed at JD Vance as a “couch fucker” even used by John Oliver.

    I read “Hillbilly Elegy” and wondered why it wasn’t in there. Snopes cleared it up in a matter of minutes. Why he hasn’t sued people into oblivion is his prerogative, but it’s a fascinating case study that we are, indeed, living in a Post-Truth environment.

    • red_hare 1 hour ago
      There was a time, in the early to mid 2010s, when the phrase "Fake News" was almost exclusively used by people in publishing to talk about a very real rise in editorial disruption as news readers shifted from being desktop and homepage-driven to mobile and facebook-driven.

      And then, one day, the politicians started saying it...

    • titanomachy 1 hour ago
      Oliver in that clip literally calls the couch-fucking thing "the fun kind of misinformation". He's not suggesting it's true.
    • justin66 1 hour ago
      Did anyone actually believe that was anything more than a joke? It was a disgusting and weird thing to suggest about a disgusting and weird guy, and highly immature, but it's only libel if it's presented as being true.
      • teddyh 4 minutes ago
        In only slightly more isolated regions of the internet, it used to be, when this story was new, that whenever this story was brought up, with dozens or more comments voicing their opinions with varying attempts at humor, there was at least one person who commented that it was fake, often with citations. As time went on, for each new instance, the number of comments dwindled, and the lone debunking comment appeared more and more rarely. Now I never see it, even though the story, with a handful of credulous comments, still occasionally appear. So I would assume that yes, many people believe it.
    • kittoes 1 hour ago
      Interesting that you focus on John Oliver's bit considering that it came up in the context of JD Vance doubling down on the whole "they're eating the cats and dogs thing".

      https://youtu.be/NtRPLCso0Sw?t=14m09s

      Makes me believe that you're really not commenting in good faith here.

    • ourmandave 1 hour ago
      Tucker Carlson set the precedent when he was sued for libel by Karen McDougal and won because Fox New lawyers successfully argued he wasn't a reporter and no reasonable person would believe he's stating facts.

      Unless he's repeating Trump's lies, then 77M people apparently believe it.

      • pessimizer 17 minutes ago
        > The challenged statement was an obvious exaggeration, cushioned within an undisputed news story. The statement could not reasonably be understood to imply an assertion of objective fact, and therefore, did not amount to defamation.

        "Rachel Maddow Wins in 9th Circuit; OAN Loses Appeal in Defamation Case"

        https://timesofsandiego.com/business/2021/08/17/rachel-maddo...

        -----

        > Maddow’s show is different than a typical news segment where anchors inform viewers about the daily news. The point of Maddow’s show is for her to provide the news but also to offer her opinions as to that news. Therefore, the Court finds that the medium of the alleged defamatory statement makes it more likely that a reasonable viewer would not conclude that the contested statement implies an assertion of objective fact.

        https://timesofsandiego.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/MADDO...

        -----

        The statement in queston: "[...T]he most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America really literally is paid Russian propaganda."

    • ubertaco 1 hour ago
      You're getting downvotes because the target of this particular lie was a known liar, so people probably feel like it's some sort of poetic justice (or they know it's just in-kind retaliation and are cathartically satisfied by it).

      I don't think the right answer to widespread disinformation campaigns is retaliatory disinformation campaigns (even if they're couched – pun not intended – in a just-barely-thin-enough veil of "wink wink we know this is a joke").

      The right answer is to create systems and measures that actually limit disinformation.

      • arjie 33 minutes ago
        I’m with you. The net effect actually is something akin to honking one’s horn at a guy who honked at you. You think you’re giving him a taste of his own medicine, but walking by I only see two people honking their horn and I’d ideally prefer not to be around the horn honkers since they’re unpleasant.
    • righthand 1 hour ago
      Purveyors of post-truth lies don’t turn around and sue people. They just peddle more lies, this is the kind of environment scum like the Vance’s live for.