The main problem is that LLMs are pulling from those sources too. An LLM often won't distinguish between highly reputable sources and any random page that has enough relevant keywords, as it's not actually capable of picking its own sources carefully and analyzing each one's legitimacy, at least not without a ton of time and computing power that would make it unusable for most quick queries.
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I can't speak for the original poster, but I also use Kagi and I sometimes use the AI assistant, mostly just for quick simple questions to save time when I know most articles on it are gonna have a lot of filler, but it's been reliable for other more complex questions too. (I just would rather not rely on it too heavily since I know the cognitive debt effects of LLMs are quite real.)
It's almost always quite accurate. Kagi's search indexing is miles ahead of any other search I've tried in the past (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, StartPage, Qwant, SearXNG) so the AI naturally pulls better sources than the others as a result of the underlying index. There's a reason I pay Kagi 10 bucks a month for search results I could otherwise get on DuckDuckGo. It's just that good.
I will say though, on more complex questions with regard to like, very specific topics, such as a particular random programming library, specific statistics you'd only find from a government PDF somewhere with an obscure name, etc, it does tend to get it wrong. In my experience, it actually doesn't hallucinate, as in if you check the sources there will be the information there... just not actually answering that question. (e.g. if you ask it about a stat and it pulls up reddit, but the stat is actually very obscure, it might accidentally pull a number from a comment about something entirely different than the stat you were looking for)
In my experience, DuckDuckGo's assistant was extremely likely to do this, even on more well-known topics, at a much higher frequency. Same with Google's Gemini summaries.
To be fair though, I think if you really, really use LLMs sparingly and with intention and an understanding of how relatively well known the topic is you're searching for, you can avoid most hallucinations.
Wow, a bug that specifically automatically chose keywords like "ICE", and "epstein", then blocked them from appearing, while leaving literally all other content unharmed????? How conveniently specific and well-timed! /s
little bit of sharpie over a white square and BOOM, unreadable.
Or, better yet, they'll just do what they've already done, which is simply ignore the requirement. If they won't follow anywhere saying they can't wear masks, they won't wear the codes. Simple as that.
Kagi had a good little example of language biases in LLMs.
When asked what 3.10 - 3.9 is in english, it fails, but it succeeds in Portuguese, if you format the numbers as you would in Portuguese, with commas instead of periods.
This is because... 3.10 and 3.9 often appear in the context of python version numbers, and the model gets confused, assuming there is a 0.2 difference going from version 3.9 to 3.10 instead of properly doing math.
It kind of is. For example, Edge will automatically pop up in the corner at checkout and offer coupon codes, most of them will never work, then they'll steal the affiliate revenue from whoever actually sent you to the site in the first place, or add an affiliate link where it didn't previously exist, so that the site now has more expenses that are just... paying Microsoft for no reason, making everything you buy more expensive in the long run.
It pops up whether you want it or not, it's convoluted to disable, it slows down your browser when it's running, it financially harms the shops you buy from, and it often just lies about having coupons to waste your time while pretending it's helping you.
"The torment nexus could falter without more public support for tormenting people"
Ai does work great, at some stuff. The problem is pushing it into places it doesn’t belong.
I can generally agree with this, but I think a lot of people overestimate where it DOES belong.
For example, you'll see a lot of tech bros talking about how AI is great at replacing artists, but a bunch of artists who know their shit can show you every possible way this just isn't as good as human-made works, but those same artists might say that AI is still incredibly good at programming... because they're not programmers.
It’s a good grammar and spell check.
Totally. After all, it's built on a similar foundation to existing spellcheck systems: predict the likely next word. It's good as a thesaurus too. (e.g. "what's that word for someone who's full of themselves, self-centered, and boastful?" and it'll spit out "egocentric")
It’s also great for troubleshooting consumer electronics.
Only for very basic, common, or broad issues. LLMs generally sound very confident, and provide answers regardless of if there's actually a strong source. Plus, they tend to ignore the context of where they source information from.
For example, if I ask it how to change X setting in a niche piece of software, it will often just make up an entire name for a setting or menu, because it just... has to say something that sounds right, since the previous text was "Absolutely! You can fix x by..." and it's just predicting the most likely term, which isn't going to be "wait, nevermind, sorry I don't think that's a setting that even exists!", but a made up name instead. (this is one of the reasons why "thinking" versions of models perform better, because the internal dialogue can reasonably include a correction, retraction, or self-questioning)
It will pull from names and text of entirely different posts that happened to display on the page it scraped, make up words that never appeared on any page, or infer a meaning that doesn't actually exist.
But if you have a more common question like "my computer is having x issues, what could this be?" it'll probably give you a good broad list, and if you narrow it down to RAM issues, it'll probably recommend you MemTest86.
It’s far better at search than google.
As someone else already mentioned, this is mostly just because Google deliberately made search worse. Other search engines that haven't enshittified, like the one I use (Kagi), tend to give much better results than Google, without you needing to use AI features at all.
On that note though, there is actually an interesting trend where AI models tend to pick lower-ranked, less SEO-optimized pages as sources, but still tend to pick ones with better information on average. It's quite interesting, though I'm no expert on that in particular and couldn't really tell you why other than "it can probably interpret the context of a page better than an algorithm made to do it as quickly as possible, at scale, returning 30 results in 0.3 seconds, given all the extra computing power and time."
Even then it can only help, not replace folks or complete tasks.
Agreed.
Which of course, Google did just so you'd have to search more, so you'd see more ads.
Glad to see this being reflected in hiring nowadays, especially considering how damn unaffordable college is now.
There's a fuck ton of people out there, especially in tech fields, who know a ton about something, usually because they have a bunch of personal experience messing with it, sometimes from a young age, (think: people who learn to program as kids because of Minecraft mods and now they're highly proficient, people who are very skilled at troubleshooting tech because they were the go-to tech person for their family and friends, etc) who don't necessarily have a degree, but might know a lot about a topic that could be useful in a given job.
If I wanted to hire a programmer, I'm gonna pick the person with years and years of experience starting when they were a child with a large portfolio of solid prior works over someone who just graduated college with a degree and has a base level knowledge of programming, because at that point, skills matter more than the degree itself.
It was originally reported by Nick Schifrin, a correspondent for PBS, on Twitter: https://x.com/nickschifrin/status/2013107018081489006 Alternate Frontend: https://xcancel.com/nickschifrin/status/2013107018081489006
Confirmed to be by PBS here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/norwegian-leader-says-he-received-trump-message-that-reportedly-ties-greenland-to-nobel-peace-prize
And the full text exchange including prior messages was reported by Reuters here: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exchange-messages-between-norways-prime-minister-president-trump-2026-01-19/
There's nor-way it's fake :p
Fuck around
The VnJ's founding statutes declared that its purpose was to represent "Germans of Jewish descent, who, while openly acknowledging their descent, feel so completely rooted in German culture and Wesen that they could not but think and feel as Germans.
The goal of the association was the total assimilation of Jews into the German Volksgemeinschaft, self-eradication of Jewish identity, and the expulsion from Germany of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.
The VnJ rejected Zionism, Marxism, and liberal cosmopolitanism, emphasizing absolute loyalty to the German nation-state.
Find out.
Despite the extreme nationalism of Naumann and his colleagues, the Nazi regime did not accept the Association of German National Jews as a legitimate intermediary.
the VnJ was declared illegal and dissolved on 18 November 1935. Naumann was arrested by the Gestapo the same day, and imprisoned at the Columbia concentration camp. He was released after a few weeks, and died of cancer in May 1939. Most other members and their families were murdered in the Holocaust.
Here's a few of the biggest concerns, at least from what I've read about from people's experiences living near existing ones.
- Water usage (can drain local groundwater, drive up water prices)
- Power usage (can drive up electricity prices, burns more fossil fuels or shifts clean energy to itself making other people now reliant on fossil fuels)
- Noise (people even at fairly large distances away can often still hear the sounds from the datacenter, it never stops and runs 24/7, can often give people nonstop headaches)
- Pollution (many datacenters have generators they can use, and they pollute the local air. Even if not run regularly as part of primary operations, many datacenters do tests anywhere from every month to every year to make sure the generators and backup systems work as intended, can suddenly generate a lot of air pollution without warning)
And that's not to mention secondary effects, like how it can do things like draw in crowds of temporary workers that then incentivizes short term rentals (i.e. Airbnb's) in the local area over actual homeowners, and can drive up housing costs, or how it can attract local subsidies that would otherwise go to smaller businesses that actually really need it.
Same here. I get the nostalgia factor, and that tactile buttons can feel nice, but other than that I feel like it's just a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn't necessarily work well.
Instead of a quick tap, you have to actually press on each button, which slows down typing. You can't resize, recolor, or reformat your keyboard to fit your needs better, there's no split keyboard functionality for landscape mode, etc.
Plus it's just more mechanical failure points and areas that dust and gunk can get stuck in.
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It is literally just the bill that was introduced, directly from the site of the senator that introduced it.
Any news organization or third party source is gonna be pulling from this exact same source, because that's how all bills are initially found out about.
Why couldn’t one argue that Nick Shirley commited libel/slander
They could. They being the individuals and organizations talked about. Not the community, bystanders, people affected by food stamps cuts, kids or their parents who go to the daycares, etc.
Their actions did in fact directly impact everyone involved?
"Directly" is doing the heavy lifting here, and that's why this doesn't work. Trump cutting food stamps and Nick Shirley's claims against the daycares are entirely separate actions. Even if Nick Shirley had told Trump directly to cut food stamps, based on all the same lies, he wouldn't be sued, Trump would be sued for being the one who actually did the cuts.
Did they claim you did something, yes
They claimed some daycares did, not every individual affected by the food stamp cuts, which is another reason why those people can't sue.
Did they do it with the intention to cause harm, yes.
Unfortunately that's something a court would have to debate for a very long time, and find hard evidence for. (e.g. messages saying "I know it's not true but I just hate those people" would be damn near incriminating in their own right)
All harmed should be able to sue
Should? Probably, at least in this instance it seems like it'd be beneficial overall.
Will? That's another story. The legal system just isn't set up in a way for that type of thing to work, given what I've mentioned previously.
The article seems to be implying that this is a common problem that happens constantly and that the companies creating these AI models just don’t give a fuck.
Not only does the article not once state that this is a common problem, only explaining the technical details of how it works, and the possible legal ramifications of it, but they mention how, according to nearly any AI scholar/expert you can talk to, this is not some fixable problem. If you take data, and effectively do extremely lossy compression on it, there is still a way for that data to theoretically be recovered.
Advancing LLMs while claiming you'll work on it doing this doesn't change the fact that this is a problem inherent to LLMs. There are certainly ways to prevent it, reduce its likelihood, etc, but you can't entirely remove the problem. The article is simply about how LLMs inherently memorize data, and while you can mask it with more varied training data, you still can't avoid the fact that trained weights memorize inputs, and when combined together, can eventually reproduce those inputs.
To be very clear, again, I'm not saying it's impossible to make this happen less, but it's still an inherent part of how LLMs work, and isn't some entirely fixable problem. Is it better now than it used to be? Sure. Is it fully fixable? Never.
Clearly nobody is distributing copyrighted images by asking AI to do its best to recreate them. When you do this, you end up with severely shitty hack images that nobody wants to look at
It's actually a major problem for artists where people will pass their art through an AI model to reimagine it slightly differently so it can't be copyright striked, but will still retain some of the more human choices, design elements, and overall composition.
Spend any amount of time on social platforms with artists and you'll find many of them now don't complain as much about people directly stealing their art and reposting it, but more people stealing their images and changing them a bit with AI, then reposting it so it's just different enough they can feign innocence and tell their followers it's all their work.
Basically, if no one is actually using these images except to say, “aha! My academic research uncovered this tiny flaw in your model that represents an obscure area of AI research!” why TF should anyone care?
The thing is, while these are isolated experiments meant to test for these behaviors as quickly as possible with a small set of researchers, when you look at the sheer scale of people using AI tools now, then statistically speaking, you will inevitably get people who put in a prompt that is similar enough to a work that was trained on, and it will output something almost identical to that work, without the prompter realizing.
Why do you need to point to absolutely, ridiculously obscure shit like finding a flaw in Stable Diffusion 1.4 (from years ago, before 99% of the world had even heard of generative image AI)?
Because they highlight the flaws that continue to plague existing models, but have been around for long enough that you can run long-term tests, run them more cheaply on current AI hardware at scale, and can repeat tests with the same conditions rather than starting over again every single time a new model is released.
Again, this memorization is inherent to how these AI models are trained, it gets better with new releases as more training data is used, and more alterations are made, but it cannot be removed, because removing the memorization removes all the training.
I'll admit it's less of a "smoking gun" against use of AI in itself than it used to be when the issue was more prevalent, but acting like it's a non-issue isn't right either.
Generative AI is just the latest way of giving instructions to computers. That’s it! That’s all it is.
It is not, unless you consider every single piece of software or code ever to be just "a way of giving instructions to computers" since code is just instructions for how a computer should operate, regardless of the actual tangible outcomes of those base-level instructions.
Generative AI is a type of computation that predicts the most likely sequence of text, or distribution of pixels in an image. That is all it is. It can be used to predict the most likely text, in a machine readable format, which can then control a computer, but that is not what it inherently is in its entirety.
It can also rip off artists and journalists, hallucinate plausible misinformation about current events, or delude you into believing you're the smartest baby of 1996.
It's like saying a kitchen knife is just a way to cut foods... when it can also be used to stab someone, make crafts, or open your packages. It can be "just a way of altering the size and quantity of pieces of food", but it can also be a murder weapon or a letter opener.
Nobody gave a shit about this kind of thing when Star Trek was pretending to do generative AI in the Holodeck
That would be because it was a fictional series about a nonexistent future that didn't affect anyone's life today in a negative way if nonexistent job roles were replaced, and most people didn't have to think about how it would affect them if it became reality today.
Do you want the cool shit from Star Trek’s imaginary future or not? This is literally what computer scientists have been dreaming of for decades. It’s here! Have some fun with it!
People also want flying cars without thinking of the noise pollution and traffic management. Fiction isn't always what people think it could be.
Generative AI uses up less power/water than streaming YouTube or Netflix
But Generative AI is not replacing YouTube or Netflix, it's primarily replacing web searches. So when someone goes to ChatGPT instead of Google, that uses anywhere from a few tens of times more energy to a couple hundreds more.
Yet they will still also use Netflix on top of that.
I expect you’re just as vocal about streaming video, yeah?
People generally aren't, because streaming video tends to have a much more positive effect on their lives than AI.
Watching a new show or movie is fun and relaxing. If it isn't, you just... stop watching. Nobody forces it down your throat.
Having LLMs pollute my search results with plausible sounding nonsense, and displace the jobs of artists I enjoy the art of, is not fun, nor relaxing. Talking with someone on social media just to find out they aren't even a real human is annoying. Trying to troubleshoot an issue and finding made up solutions makes my problem even harder to solve.
We can't necessarily all be focusing on every single possible thing that takes energy, but it's easy to focus on the thing that most people have an overall negative association with the effects of.
Two birds, one stone.
I'm honestly not even sure it's deliberate.
If you give a probability guessing machine like LLMs the ability to review content, it's probably just gonna be more likely to rank things as you expect for your search specifically than an algorithm made to extremely quickly pull the most relevant links... based on only some of the page as keywords, with no understanding of how the context of your search relates to each page.
The downside is, of course, that LLMs use way more energy than regular search algorithms, take longer to provide all their citations, etc.
As a reminder to people I already know will be furiously typing that these protests won't stop trump, or that they don't stop anything: that's not the point.
These protests exist to stop people from feeling hopeless, then to get them energized and motivated, then to give them ways to exercise their rights and free will to actually do concrete actions.
Holding a sign at a protest doesn't stop Trump, but giving millions of people booklets, cards, zines, and papers that direct them to their local ICE rapid response networks, get them canvassing for leftist politicians in their area, and giving them hope that lets them keep doing those things in the future is infinitely more valuable than saying "stay at home, these protests are worthless, now somehow organize your entire community to go raid an ICE facility or something, while you have no motivation or hope for the future because you feel alone."
These also exist to dispel narratives fascists use to justify their abuse of power. Nazis feel afraid when confronted with the fact that there are a lot more people that hate them than people that are with them. It's why ICE officers routinely leave scenes of arrests empty handed when enough community members show up. They're cowards.
At the last No Kings I went to, the organizers told everyone that they knew there would be people on the sidelines trying to agitate protestors, disrupt chants, and spread pro-Trump messaging. None of them showed up after they saw the size of the protest. The closest thing to it was someone in an apartment building too afraid to even put a sign outside their window playing a shitty rap song about missing a shot at Trump, with great lyrics like "Btch, you missed", and "the left can't aim."
The alternative is everyone staying at home, getting progressively more angry and simultaneously hopeless, while the Nazis in power get even more emboldened from seeing only the few, more radical individuals willing to take action into their own hands while everyone else feels to hopeless to do anything, and I don't know about you, but that's not the world I want to live in.
I agree that these protests are very liberal and often convince some participants that the act of the protest itself is enough, that they've done their civic duty, but the people who are convinced by that are the same people that already self-limit the extent of their political action to holding an anti-ICE sign on the side of the road while people honk. They were never going to engage in any kind of actually disruptive protest in the first place.