Check Your Fucking Sources, People

wing-_-nuts

Ironically, 'source checking' is something AI is quite good at.

6stringmerc

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.

ekianjo

> Links No Longer Mean Credibility They never did!

tinfoilhatter

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.

louiereederson

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.

throw310822

> 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.

RajT88

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)

SllX

> 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.

vslira

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.

arjie

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

TZubiri

>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.

andai

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? ;)

Upvoter33

"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.

AlienRobot

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!

dwa3592

This is spot on. I think anyone who pays attention has probably ran into the same issues themselves. Keeping a chain of custody of information sources was hard before AI and now it doesn't even f$#$%% matter.

simianwords

From my personal experience, ChatGPT doesn't fail at the fringe either. I would really like reproducible errors because I tend to trust this kind of usage almost completely

ghusto

I remember when the "AI feeding AI" issue was raised some time ago, we were told that OpenAI and co were "doing something about it. I've heard nothing since then though. What was/is being done about it?