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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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AIs doing research do make errors all the time but '45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue' isn't too bad. Human researchers in published academic papers have a 25% error rate in their citations: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.0538

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3167934/

Substantial quotation errors were found in 9 of the 50 statements (18%). The incidence of minor errors was 14%. Although the small size of the sample allows only a rough estimation of the error rate (95% confidence interval [CI] of substantial quotation errors: 9.2% to 30.5%), this result agrees well with the rates identified in the literature.

By the way, I found both of these papers through AI, which faithfully represented them. With a simple albeit-inference-costly script I bet you could lower hallucination rates 80% or more.

AI absolutely can summarize an article and reliably answer questions, try it and see what you get. I put in a few thousands words of my own short fiction and it could understand and give useful criticism and analysis. Note when I say 'it' I mean Sonnet 4.5, not something given out for free.

If you're using the free version of Grok as your main AI then I can see why you dislike it so much! Neither particularly smart or charismatic.

Writing citations in academic work is mich more difficult than regurgiating a few news soundbites. Nevertheless, 25 is still much less than 45.

With a simple albeit-inference-costly script I bet you could lower hallucination rates 80% or more.

Maybe it's possible, but the tools people actually use arent that.

Note when I say 'it' I mean Sonnet 4.5, not something given out for free.

People have been saying their fave paid model is better for years, but today's free is better than the paid from a while ago.

I tried claude sonnet before and it's fine but nothing game changing.

Today's free model is still free and necessarily well below the frontier, that's why it's free. Sonnet, when you get deeper into it, is on a whole other level. It can and has seriously messed with people's heads, more discerning people, above and beyond the weakwilled who get eaten up by GPT4o.

Sonnet would not and does not make the mistakes at the rate BBC ascribes to the crap cheap models. It does make mistakes all the time but is a useful research tool, good at aggregating or finding things.

IMO their article itself is misleading since it ascribes to ChatGPT and Gemini only GPT4o and Gemini Flash. Like if I decide to pick out poor, dumb MAGA people and say 'look at these MAGA people, they're stupid, therefore MAGA is stupid' and choose not to consider the smart MAGA people on the basis that people are more likely to run into the former and not the latter... it's not good journalism. That's not to say that MAGA isn't stupid, there are stupid elements but it's more complicated than this kind of smear campaign. They then don't mention that's what they're doing, they do what you do and say 'AI is inaccurate' when they mean 'cheap AI is inaccurate.' Cheap air travel is unpleasant. Cheap food is bad for you. Cheaper is worse.

New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested.

But they can't be bothered to test the good AI platforms of course...

This time, we used the free/consumer versions of ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini. Free versions were chosen to replicate the default (and likely most common) experience for users. Responses were generated in late May and early June 2025.

If I had the resources to get human experts to rate the media, selectively choosing the credulous outlets, and imposed my own standards of truthfulness, I could easily prove that human journalists were grossly inferior. Hell, they already are prone to mass hallucinations like the 'datacentres are using all the water' meme. Or deliberately misleading stuff such as eliding the difference between an AI chip and a pod: https://x.com/GavinSBaker/status/1980691878262501673

They aren't trustworthy for any AI-related topic given their proclivity to the 'big tech bad, big tech bad, pay us more money now now now now now!!!' lines of argument which they've basically applied to AI as well. There are serious issues with big tech and AI accuracy but journalists still need to be bullied much more so they lose whatever remaining undeserved prestige and reputation they still retain.

Sonnet would not and does not make the mistakes at the rate BBC ascribes to the crap cheap models. It does make mistakes all the time but is a useful research tool, good at aggregating or finding things.

Clearly you think that Sonnet is some special sauce over other models. It's not. Since Sonnet has a few free queries, I tried it for you, and the results are absolute dogshit. I asked a basic question from the pdf someone linked above:

https://claude.ai/share/8eb38e62-502a-4b60-be93-2b32d24a057e

Shoplifting offences increased by 13% to 529,994 offences in the year ending June 2025 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/crimeinenglandandwales/yearendingjune2025), representing record levels.

Wrong. The source did not say that it reached record levels, simply that it increased y/y

The UK government has introduced the Crime and Policing Bill as its primary legislative response, which includes several key measures: (https://www.talkingretail.com/news/industry-news/retail-associations-react-to-ons-figures-showing-13-shoplifting-rise-23-10-2025/)

Wrong. There's no citation that this bill is the primary response to the problem by the government, versus other initiatives.

Several major police operations are underway: Operation Pegasus: (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/action-plan-to-tackle-shoplifting-launched)

The link specifically says "This was published under the 2022 to 2024 Sunak Conservative government" and we have no evidence such an operation is still underway. It's also never referred to as an "operation"

Policing Minister Diana Johnson held a retail crime summit with major retailers to coordinate efforts on mapping what's happening on high streets (https://www.itv.com/news/london/2025-04-24/shoplifting-in-england-and-wales-soars-to-highest-since-police-records-began)

The source does not indicate that any mapping of what's happening was done at the summit.

Police have committed to prioritise urgently attending shoplifting instances involving violence against shop workers, where security guards have detained an offender, or where attendance is needed to secure evidence, with police attendance assessed based on risk and prolific or juvenile offenders treated with elevated priority (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/action-plan-to-tackle-shoplifting-launched)

Also outdated.

Rating: FAIL - Sonnet 4.5 is just as slop as any other shitty model.

If I had the resources to get human experts to rate the media, selectively choosing the credulous outlets, and imposed my own standards of truthfulness, I could easily prove that human journalists were grossly inferior.

Ok if humans are so bad, pick an actual news outlet of your choice, it can be as shitty as you want, and pick 10 actual news articles of your choice, not opinion columns or other bs, and show that 45% of those have errors. I'm happy to make a wager on this.

Or deliberately misleading stuff such as eliding the difference between an AI chip and a pod:

https://archive.is/5H3CA

THE FT MARKETS AND FINANCE BLOG

This is considered a blog published under their website, so it's not actual news.

Shoplifting offences increased by 13% to 529,994 offences in the year ending June 2025

FAIL. Those are record levels, even before accounting for low reporting rates. Sonnet consistently gets this right btw.

There's no citation that this bill is the primary response to the problem by the government, versus other initiatives

FAIL. Claude specifically said primary legislative response, not primary response.

The link specifically says "This was published under the 2022 to 2024 Sunak Conservative government" and we have no evidence such an operation is still underway.

FAIL, the operation (which is a useful and reasonable description of what it is, in some respects better than 'project' which the British actually use, since operation conveys a sense of movement and continuous activity whereas project is more of a static construction process) is still underway, you can call them and report crime today: https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/wsi/watch-schemes-initiatives/pp/project-pegasus/

Also outdated.

FAIL, since it describes Pegasus which is still ongoing so can't be considered outdated. Also how is '2 years old' outdated by any reasonable sense of the word?

Rating: FAIL - poor nitpicking attempt.

Here is my Sonnet Research on the topic, Research being something you can only get if you pay: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/ef91a58b-8dfa-4529-b076-3de6ef14a40f

Now they cut out all the links for the web artifact which makes this rather unhelpful for the specific use-case. I checked a few and didn't find any errors, though I imagine there are some. I personally disagree with the methodology and argument since it takes the limp-wristed 'be really nice to the drug addicts' line of argument when I'm confident that 'lock them up' would work better, if the UK knew how to construct prisons properly. Nevertheless, there are lots of media reporting on this issue that take the limp-wristed approach. Sonnet has its biases, nevertheless I remain convinced that it and extended research is useful.

Ok if humans are so bad, pick an actual news outlet of your choice, it can be as shitty as you want, and pick 10 actual news articles of your choice, not opinion columns or other bs, and show that 45% of those have errors.

I'm not a subject matter expert in a wide range of domains, so I can't do that. That's literally what I said. I can observe it makes plenty of errors or is actively misleading in areas I know lots about but I can't show that's representative. This is why Gell-Man Amnesia is a thing.

https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/wsi/watch-schemes-initiatives/pp/project-pegasus/

Project Pegasus is an initiative set up to get people who work in aviation or live near airports to join the fight against organised crime and terrorism.

Did you notice that the the page you linked is about airport security and not shoplifting? Hmmm maybe you screwed up somewhere, or maybe AIslop misled you. Maybe you should just admit you're totally wrong.

Those are record levels, even before accounting for low reporting rates. Sonnet consistently gets this right btw.

It's near but below the record. Since the number is actually falling on a rolling average, the AI is quite misleading. Even if you were to accept that the claim is right, you know what they say about a broken clock. The data is past the training cutoff, and there's no source that supports the information, so the AI can't have legitimately known that the number was near the record or not. So in that case it's a hallucination.

I'm not a subject matter expert in a wide range of domains, so I can't do that. That's literally what I said.

Yet somehow I can pick out errors on half of the AI slop people like you slop out all the time.

I can observe it makes plenty of errors or is actively misleading in areas I know lots about but I can't show that's representative.

Then pick out 10 articles of your choice in an area you know about.

I'm surprised to find that there are two Project Pegasuses but I observe that the anti-theft Pegasus is a part of Opal, who are also still continuing their work.

https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/14920/html/

https://www.npcc.police.uk/our-work/work-of-npcc-committees/Crime-Operations-coordination-committee/opal/

So even if my link was wrong, my point still stands. Pegasus is still a thing in practical terms. You are the one who produced the idea that it had shut down, seemingly from nowhere. What source did that come from? How can you legitimately have known this info?

Since the number is actually falling on a rolling average, the AI is quite misleading

But theft is at record levels? What, we have to wait for the nano-top or regurgitate secondary sources like wikipedia? Sonnet could easily observe 'ok I know about past historical theft levels, this is higher therefore its at record highs'.

Then pick out 10 articles of your choice in an area you know about.

When I see some bad journalism I don't add it to a big list of bad articles, same with spelling errors tbh. But you can take your pick from Russiagate, spruking the case for the invasion of Iraq or suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, or this euphemism treadmill where journalists eagerly create a racial narrative if a white does something bad to blacks, whereas they bury the reverse case, mentioning race only at the very end of the article. Those are cases of deception and misleading news from 'real journalists'.

So even if my link was wrong, my point still stands. Pegasus is still a thing in practical terms.

Wow nice goalpost move into the next province. "Oh I was totally wrong but acktually in "practical terms" I'm right."

The burden is on you to produce proof that it's still running and you can't. Even more so Sonnet can't.

I don't get why you're in such denial it's a hallucination because the AI has no proof it's correct and that's that.

Those are cases of deception and misleading news from 'real journalists'

Pick 10 actual articles and show me. Otherwise you're full of crap.

Your claim is that >45% of all news articles have major errors. So pick any darn subject you know about and if your claim is true it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to find 10 examples of errors.

The burden is on you to produce proof that it's still running and you can't.

It is still running, since I showed that Project Pegasus is part of Opal and Opal is still running. QED.

If I had the resources to get human experts to rate the media, selectively choosing the credulous outlets, and imposed my own standards of truthfulness, I could easily prove that human journalists were grossly inferior.

Your claim is that >45% of all news articles have major errors.

Shameless to complain about goalpost-moving when this is what you're doing.

OK, here are some links (which is just tedious work since 10 or 10,000 links out of a gazillion articles has no statistical meaning). But since you seem to be dead set on this and love journalists so much...

https://www.eurasiantimes.com/cracks-in-j-20s-stealth-with-no-buyers-exposure/ (this whole thing is retarded if you know anything about aviation, incredibly misleading)

https://www.eurasiantimes.com/rafale-or-f-35-why-indian-rafale-jets-are-as-dangerous-as-stealth-5th-generation-f-35s/ (same kind of stupidity)

https://www.newsweek.com/india-overtakes-china-in-world-air-force-ranking-10882624 (even more retarded, I don't know how anyone can believe this, just check the squadron numbers lmao)

Here is a whole article about Indian media organizations inventing fake news, bombings of Karachi for example: https://institute.aljazeera.net/en/ajr/article/3188

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus (this was just a fantasy)

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/01/abc-news-issues-corrects-bombshell-michael-flynn-report.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-3018945/New-study-reveals-eating-chocolate-doesn-t-affect-Body-Mass-Index-help-LOSE-weight.html

https://www.allsides.com/blog/story-week-media-misfires-covington-catholic-story (Covington kids...)

https://web.archive.org/web/20060523081219/http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=398274b5-9210-43e4-ba59-fa24f4c66ad4&k=28534 (this was just made up)

The whole Washington Post Steele dossier, the legendary pissgate: https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/581347-washington-post-removes-large-portions-of-two-stories-on-steele/

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