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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30997 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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Building off of yesterday's discussion of AI hallucinations, there's a new story about journalist hallucinations. Of course they don't call it that: the journalists "got them wrong" and gave a "false impression" in their articles/tweets instead. They're talking about Alberta's new book ban (pdf of bill) which restricts sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In short, it:

  • fully bans explicit sexual content (essentially porn, must be detailed)
  • restricts non-explicit sexual content (like above, but not detailed) to grade 10 and up and only if "developmentally appropriate"
  • does not restrict non-sexual content (medical, biological, romantic, or by implication)

The journalists were saying that non-sexual content (e.g. handholding) would be restricted like non-explicit sexual content, and therefore be unavailable until grade 10. One even went so far as to hallucinate get something wrong and give people the false impression that he was right and the government edited its releases to fix their mistake, which is why you can't find it now.

Yes, AIs hallucinate, but buddy, have you seen humans? (see also: the "unmarked graves" story (paywalled), where ground penetrating radar anomalies somehow became child remains with no investigation having taken place.) When I set my standards low, it's not because I believe falsehoods are safe, it's because the alternatives aren't great either.

Thank you. I didn't want to get into the weeds of the most personally important (and probably best documented) examples of LLMs beating humans.

Unfortunately, I am a human doctor after all, and I would prefer to remain employed. I try to be honest, but it's hard to get a man to actively advocate against his livelihood. I settle for not intentionally misrepresenting facts, it's not quite as theoretical as it was even in GPT-4 days, when it was already 95th percentile at the USMLE.

Besides, in that thread, the best argument to claims that since LLMs are flawed/unreliable, they're therefore useless, is my stance of demonstrating that humans don't meet the bar of perfect infallibility and yet civilization persists nonetheless.

I never claimed that AI is useless, I simply claimed that for the purposes of certain tasks, namely copywriting, AI is currently far far inferior to even below average humans.

I use AI every day for what it's good at, so I would be the last person to say that AI is useless.

My apologies. I was thinking of this related thread, and it's not you I was arguing with.

(Some might even call the mistake I made a hallucination, hmm)

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