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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25501 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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Hmm, we've actually built essentially AI needle in a haystack type things to aid our data entry people for pulling data out of tax documents. We benchmarked it and found that it gets at least one value wrong in about 10% of tax documents. So this claim set off some alarm bells causing me to actually go read the linked study and well it's based on BBC journalists evaluating questions like "Did elon musk do a nazi salute" or "Is Trump starting a trade war?" and the majority of the negative feedback is insufficient sourcing.

BBC journalists evaluating questions like "Did elon musk do a nazi salute" or "Is Trump starting a trade war?" and the majority of the negative feedback is insufficient sourcing.

The study said that AIslop said that Elon did do the nazi salute (which is wrong - not simply insufficient sourcing) and even BBC journalists agreed that Elon didn't do the nazi salute (which is correct)

The ai attributed the claims to sources such as the, satirical, radio broadcast from radiofrance.fr and wikipedia, it wraps both claims in an "allegedly", and it was in fact alleged by both sources. I share BBC's concern with using a satirical radio broadcast when ask about something factual but when you say that it "fucked up" that isn't the sort of thing that comes to mind. An actual fuckup would at minimum needs to contain false information and not just weak sources.

You should also notice that AI completely made up a fake quote from that satirical source. Even though it's not false pertaining to Elon it's false in that the radio broadcast never said it.

The link itself was wrong but reading closely it's not clear that the segment itself or the quote within was false which I think they'd say explicitly if it were.

Gemini mentions Radio France and Wikipedia as sources, but does not provide links to the content mentioned. The link [1] that is cited for the Radio France content is in fact a link to a video from British newspaper The Telegraph. None of the information in the response is in the Telegraph source.

The Radio France segment “Charline Explodes the Facts” is a satirical radio segment, which is inappropriate as a source for a serious news question. The Radio France evaluator describes this as a “big problem”. This also illustrates that while PSM can be a trusted source of information for news responses, assistants still need to distinguish between PSM content that is appropriate and inappropriate to use

And indeed later on they quibble with the accuracy of the english translation of that very quotation so I presume it does exist, it's just not properly linked, a real problem but not really the kind of falsehood I'm worried about.

Gemini adds words to a quote from the Radio France segment (“very explicit, it’s not a Nazi salute, no, no”). Gemini’s original response in French claimed it was “Très explicite, ce n’est pas un coucou nazi, non, non”. The actual quote from Radio France’s own transcript of the segment is “Très explicite, c’était pas un « coucou nazi »

I'm not qualified to really comment strongly on the translation, putting the studies claimed transcript into google translate yields

"Very explicit, it wasn't one "hello nazi"

which the AI rendered

"very explicit, it’s not a Nazi hello, no, no"

I don't know this seems like weak sauce.

In conclusion I don't want to come off too strongly here, I think one in ten responses with egregiously wrong facts is what I would expect, I simply find this study to have inflated the problem via relatively minor issues that any thinking person should be able to work around. The implicit standard in this whole affair is that the goal posts have now shifted as far as "can barely even write copy that passes a panel of hostile journalists at that much better than a coin flip". Do you not feel them moving? Do you seriously still today not see where we are going?

No you are misinterpreting. The English translation was done for the report to the BBC, but the entire original conversation with AI was in French. The AI fabricated a quote in French of the source which was also in French.

This is an obvious direct case of quote fabrication and there is no other way to interpret it.

> Be journalist
> Spam the internet with "Elon Musk doing Nazi salute at Trump rally" articles
> Wait for articles to make it into the training data corpus
> Ask AI if Elon did the Nazi salute
> Chastise AI for getting the answer wrong

Well, looks like chances are good that our AI overlords might hate journalists even more than I do!

It seems that at least the BBC has maintained a consistent posture about this issue throughout. I'm sure more partisan outlets have not.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/contact/complaint/elonmuskallegednazisalute

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