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A bit different, but one thing I’ve seen is models repackaging Reddit slop. Like, it will do a search, find a Reddit thread somewhat related where someone in a comment casually mentioned incorrect information that any human would have dismissed. The model takes that as granted, but expands on it and present it as a well established fact, presented in a very plausible fashion.

In general I don’t find models to be good at evaluating the quality of a source :(



Newspapers have been doing this for a long time, notably the Metro in London.


There’s also whole TikTok (etc) channels who take random posts from Ask Reddit and just AI narrate the question and the top n highly-voted answers while showing a screenshot of each comment.


London had a non existant restautant as #1 recommendation but I think it was done by using multiple (sock puppet?) accounts to create fake reviews

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shed_at_Dulwich


Video on it from the creator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqPARIKHbN8


Which itself is fed to LLMs, what a beautiful system we built here


What percentage reads Metro and what percentage uses LLMs


The other day Gemini gave me the correct answer, but cited an outdated Reddit thread which basically said the opposite.


As if it needs results to do that. You can give it a description of what you're looking for and get back some nonsense about how it's a "viral" and "legendary" page, with plenty of entirely fake details because it didn't actually find the page you wanted.


i actively assume it is worse since, for example, spez signed a 60 million dollar deal to give Google access to the firehose. so then if you have niche, highly engaged subreddits infested by AI bots creating posts, then commenting on posts, then being trained on that content... you have Ouroburos eating its own poop, and models have less then zero incentive to evaluate the quality of a source, especially if they are the source


Why do they have a negative incentive to evaluate the quality? Users like high quality sources and can freely move between models offered by different companies.




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