> Firstly, just about every paper ever written in the history of papers has errors in it

LLMs make it easier and faster, much like guns make killing easier and faster.

LLM are a force multiplier of this kind of errors though. It's not easy to hallucinate papers out of whole cloth, but LLMs can easily and confidently do it, quote paragraphs that don't exist, and do it tirelessly and at a pace unmatched by humans.

Humans can do all of the above but it costs them more, and they do it more slowly. LLMs generate spam at a much faster rate.

>It's not easy to hallucinate papers out of whole cloth, but LLMs can easily and confidently do it, quote paragraphs that don't exist, and do it tirelessly and at a pace unmatched by humans.

But no one is claiming these papers were hallucinated whole, so I don't see how that's relevant. This study -- notably to sell an "AI detector", which is largely a laughable snake-oil field -- looked purely at the accuracy of citations[1] among a very large set of citations. Errors in papers are not remotely uncommon, and finding some errors is...exactly what one would expect. As the GP said, do the same study on pre-LLM papers and you'll find an enormous number of incorrect if not fabricated citations. Peer review has always been an illusion of auditing.

1 - Which is such a weird thing to sell an "AI detection" tool. Clearly it was mostly manual given that they somehow only managed to check a tiny subset of the papers, so in all likelihood was some guy going through citations and checking them on Google Search.

I've zero interest in the AI tool, I'm discussing the broader problem.

The references were made up, and this is easier and faster to do with LLMs than with humans. Easier to do inadvertently, too.

As I said, LLMs are a force multiplier for fraud and inadvertent errors. So it's a big deal.

I think we should see a chart as % of “fabricated” references from past 20 years. We should see a huge increase after 2020-2021. Anyone has this chart data?

I don't know whether that use of the em-dash is grammatically correct, but I've seen enough native English writers use it like that. One example is Philip K Dick.

Perhaps you have—or perhaps you've seen this construction instead, where (despite also using "or") the phrase on the other side of the dash is properly parenthetical and has its own subject.

I think generating assembly with an LLM would be like copying from a magazine back then: nothing learned.

But I wonder, do LLMs help explain chunks of 6502 assembly code, in your experience? Say, if one was learning.

yeah that certainly does happen. Especially if you give it the context of the machine since 6502 itself and opcodes do you no good unless you know the memory layout/ map which is in a sense what machine you're on. NES and C64 are 6502, heck even SNES is but 6502 opcodes are nothing since action is in memory you're interacting with.

When you provide context and the memory map, it does help explaining what algos you're looking at and what's going on. I've had a bit more luck with gemini rather than claude on this vs in general claude codes better. ChatGPT is for the most part lost in hallucinations.

> A citizen and a person doesn't have to be defined as what they consume, do they?

I find this is at the core of Stallman's criticism of the term "content". We speak of media "content", of "content authors", etc, as if movies, articles, books, etc were just that: content, ready to be commoditized, packaged and sold. And some of it is! But we've conditioned to think of everything as "content" to be "consumed", which is depressing.

Haven't read Stallman on it, but it's funny how vague & generic the term is, and how it requires the existence of a container. Content is simply "that which is contained." Seems to me it's a word you use when your primary interest is the container. Like you're the managing editor of a news website or the like. Metaphorically you have a mouth you need to fill with words, any words, or else people will stop paying attention. But I don't look at the world that way. I appreciate something good and call it whatever it is. The only time I use "content" is as an ironic and derisive synonym for cynical low-quality crap.

You should read Stallman, because what you said (container vs content) is his actual beef with it. It's looking at it from the perspective of companies who own the platform (the container) rather than from the more human perspective of artists and authors.

And we've all adopted it. Or mostly, anyway.

Less and less people have the option to male "art" and need to make "content" to simply survive. Art has historically been reserved for the elite privileged and it seems the world is heading back towards old norms as wealth consolidates.

In a similar breath, that may be why we don't heat much of the next generation of Stallman's and instead hear of a looming crisis in FOSS as the old guard retires. Less devs (if they are even pursuing that path down the line) will have the free time to choose FOSS as a path, unless big tech is paying for it to bend ot to their will.

>But we've conditioned to think of everything as "content" to be "consumed", which is depressing.

Specialization pretty much requires it, and our adherence to capitalism demands it.

You specialize to get paid, and by getting paid you can pay others that specialize to create. And you're right, it's a depressing system, but it's no less depressing than what came before that.

I have started to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow and while I cannot speak to most of the book, even in the first hundred or so of (ebook) pages, it challenges that frame of reference in a way that is clarifying, in the sense of being a palate cleanser, admitting different ways of thinking about these things.

>but it's no less depressing than what came before that.

You can make an argument that it is more depressing when the compartmentalization of everything also isolates off community. No amount of individual riches can repair a trusted community to engage with. We're definitely getting lonlier in the process.

While acknowledging the truth of what you're saying (the first sentence, anyway), the problem is going into a cynical, defeatist "that's the way things are". A kind of learned helplessness.

So you just want a larger police force than them.

What do you mean?

I suppose back in 2010 it gave different results. I think Ursula's point was how opaque it was...

Oh wow I missed that this was from 2010. Seems just as relevant as today.

Another example: r/AskHistorians is so heavily moderated almost every comment gets deleted.

Their standards of quality are very high. It's not a sub to push your views or argue, it's a sub for historians or people who can back an answer with academic references. So most comments and answers will get modded.

It's oddly refreshing. No flamewars, no junk comments, no "everybody knows the reason X did Y is Z" because that won't be accepted by the mods.

It's not perfect, but it's good enough.

AskHistorians is far and away the best moderated sub on the site, but it relies entirely on guidelines that you can understand and agree with. Moderation on other subs (no clue about this one) is so heinously biased it makes them unusable. Very common on political and news oriented subs....

It's ok in wild bushes (as long as children don't usually play there), but what's the justification for dumping it in other people's bushes and gardens?

They probably would say "no" if you asked them, so you probably shouldn't. The OP's mom, I mean.

They are also surprisingly effective because they often show things that I might actually buy (especially when it's on sale, which is precisely when they show ads for it).

No, that's not an excuse because Steam is also a launcher to play your games. If the store was completely separate then sure it would be OK to promote games being sold in the store there.

You can easily disable the pop-up ads.