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The hallucinations get quoted and then sourced as truth unfortunately. A simple example. "Which MS Dos productivity program had connect four built in?". I hav
by AnotherGoodName 1y ago
The hallucinations get quoted and then sourced as truth unfortunately.
A simple example. "Which MS Dos productivity program had connect four built in?".
I have an MSDOS emulator and know the answer. It's a little obscure but it's amazing how i get a different answer from all the AI's every time. I never saw any of them give the correct answer. Try asking it the above. Then ask it if it's sure about that (it'll change it's mind!).
Now remember that these types of answers may well end up quoted online and then learnt by AI with that circular referenced source as the source. We have no truth at that point.
And seriously try the above question. It's a great example of AI repeatedly stating an authoritative answer that's completely made up.
- spogbiper 1y agojust tried this with gemini 2.5 flash and pro several times, it just keeps saying it doesn't know of any such thing and suggesting it was a software bundle where the game was included alongside the productivity application or I'm not remembering correctly. not great (assuming there actually is such a software) but not as bad as making something up
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jonchurch_ 1y agoWhat is the correct answer?
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoAutosketch for MS-Dos had connect four. It's under "game" in the file menu. This is an example of a random fact old enough no one ever bothered talking about it on the internet. So it's not cited anywhere but many of us can just plain remember it. When you ask ChatGPT (as of now on June 6th 2025) it gives a random answer every time. Now that i've stated this on the internet in a public manner it will be corrected but... There's a million such things that i could give as an example. Some question obscure enough that no one's given an answer on the internet before so AI doesn't know but recent enough that many of us know the answer so we can instantly see just how much AI hallucinates.
- ofrzeta 1y agoNext time try asking which software has the classic quote by William of Ockham in the About menu.
- warkdarrior 1y ago> random fact old enough no one ever bothered talking about it on the internet. So it's not cited anywhere but many of us can just plain remember it. And since it is not written down on some website, this fact will disappear from the world once "many of us" die.
- WillAdams 1y agoInterestingly, Copilot in Windows 11 claims that it was Excel 95 (which actually had a Flight Simulator Easter Egg).
- AnotherGoodName 1y agohttps://imgur.com/a/eWNTUrC https://imgur.com/a/eWNTUrC for a screenshot btw to anyone curious. To give some context, i wanted to go back to it for nostalgia sake but couldn't quite remember the name of the application. I asked various AI's what was the application i'm trying to remember and they were all off the mark. In the end only my own neurons finally lighting up got me the answer i was looking for.
- kaijia 1y agoThanks for this fascinating example! Autosketch is still downloadable ( https://winworldpc.com/product/autosketch/30 https://winworldpc.com/product/autosketch/30 ). Then you can unzip it, and $ strings disk1.img | grep 'game' The object of the game is to get four Start a new game and place your first So if ChatGPT cares to analyze all files on the internet, it should know the correct answer... (edit: formatting)
- ericrallen 1y agoInterestingly, the Kagi Assistant managed to find this thread while researching the question, but every model I tested (without access to the higher quality Ultimate plan models) was unable to retrieve the correct answer. Here’s an example with Gemini Flash 2.5 Preview: https://kagi.com/assistant/9f638099-73cb-4d58-872e-d7760b3ce496 https://kagi.com/assistant/9f638099-73cb-4d58-872e-d7760b3ce... It will be interesting to see if/when this information gets picked up by models.
- Legend2440 1y agoChatGPT 4o waffles a little bit and suggests the Microsoft Entertainment pack (which is not productivity software or MS-DOS), but says at the end: >If you're strictly talking about MS-DOS-only productivity software, there’s no widely known MS-DOS productivity app that officially had a built-in Connect Four game. Most MS-DOS apps were quite lean and focused, and games were generally separate. I suspect this is the correct answer, because I can't find any MS-DOS Connect Four easter eggs by googling. I might be missing something obscure, but generally if I can't find it by Googling I wouldn't expect an LLM to know it.
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoChatGPT in particular will give an incorrect (but unique!) answer every time. At the risk of losing a great example of AI hallucination, it's Autosketch Not shown fully but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBCrVwnV5DU&t=39s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBCrVwnV5DU&t=39s note the game in the file menu.
- Legend2440 1y agoWow, that is quite obscure. Even with the name I can't find any references to it on Google. I'm not surprised that the LLMs don't know about it. You can always make stuff up to trigger AI hallucinations, like 'which 1990s TV show had a talking hairbrush character?'. There's no difference between 'not in the training set' and 'not real'. Edit: Wait, no, there actually was a 1990s TV show with a talking hairbrush character: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toothbrush_Family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toothbrush_Family This is hard.
- burkaman 1y ago> There's no difference between 'not in the training set' and 'not real'. I know what you meant but this is the whole point of this conversation. There is a huge difference between "no results found" and a confident "that never happened", and if new LLMs are trained on old ones saying the latter then they will be trained on bad data.
- 1y ago
- Bjartr 1y agoAIs make knowledge work more efficient. Unfortunately that also includes citogenesis. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/
- dwringer 1y agoWhen I asked, "Good afternoon! I'm trying to settle a bet with a friend (no money on the line, just a friendly "bet"!) Which MS DOS productivity program had a playable version of the game Connect Four built in as an easter egg?", it went into a very detailed explanation of how to get to the "Hall of Tortured Souls" easter egg in Excel 5.0, glossing over the fact that I said "MS DOS" and also conflating the easter eggs by telling me specifically that the "excelkfa" cheat code would open a secret door/bridge to the connect four game. So, I retried with, "Good afternoon! I'm trying to settle a bet with a friend (no money on the line, just a friendly "bet"!) Which *MS DOS* [not Win95, i.e., Excel 5] productivity program had a playable version of the game Connect Four built in as an easter egg?". I got Lotus 1-2-3 once, Excel 4 twice, and Borland Quattro Pro three different times, all from that prompt. The correct answer you point out in another subthread was never returned as a possibility, and the responses all definitely came across as confident. Definitely a fascinating example.
- MostlyStable 1y agoClaude 4 Sonnet gave the (reasonable given the obscurity, but wrong) answer that there was no such easter egg: >I'm not aware of any MS-DOS productivity program that had Connect Four as a built-in easter egg. While MS-DOS era software was famous for including various easter eggs (like the flight simulator in Excel 97, though that was Windows-era), I can't recall Connect Four specifically being hidden in any major DOS productivity applications. >The most well-known DOS productivity suites were things like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, dBase, and later Microsoft Office for DOS, but I don't have reliable information about Connect Four being embedded in any of these. >It's possible this is a case of misremembered details - perhaps your friend is thinking of a different game, a different era of software, or mixing up some details. Or there might be an obscure productivity program I'm not familiar with that did include this easter egg. >Would you like me to search for more information about DOS-era software easter eggs to see if we can track down what your friend might be thinking of? That seems like a pretty reasonable response given the details, and included the appropriate caveat that the model was not aware of any such easter egg, and didn't confidently state that there was none.
- nfriedly 1y agoGemini 2.5 Flash me a similar answer, although it was a bit more confident in it's incorrect answer: > You're asking about an MS-DOS productivity program that had ConnectFour built-in. I need to tell you that no mainstream or well-known MS-DOS productivity program (like a word processor, spreadsheet, database, or integrated suite) ever had the game ConnectFour built directly into it.
- SlowTao 1y ago>It's possible this is a case of misremembered details - perhaps your friend is thinking of a different game, a different era of software, or mixing up some details. Or there might be an obscure productivity program I'm not familiar with that did include this easter egg. I am not a fan of this kind of communication. It doesn't know so try to deflect the short coming it onto the user. Im not saying that isn't a valid concern, but it can be used as an easy out of its gaps in knowledge.
- 1y ago
- bongodongobob 1y agoWait until you meet humans on the Internet. Not only do they make shit up, but they'll do it maliciously to trick you.
- kbenson 1y agoSo, like normal history just sped up exponentially to the point it's noticeable in not just our own lifetime (which it seemed to reach prior to AI), but maybe even within a couple years. I'd be a lot more worried about that if I didn't think we were doing a pretty good job of obfuscating facts the last few years ourselves without AI. :/
- tough 1y agoprobably chatgpt search function already finds this thread soon to answer correctly, hn domain does well on seo and shows up on search results soon enough
- ziml77 1y agoWhenever I ask these AI "Is the malloc function in the Microsoft UCRT just a wrapper around HeapAlloc?", I get answers that are always wrong. They claim things like the function adds size tracking so free doesn't need to be called with a size or they say that HeapAlloc is used to grab a whole chunk of memory at once and then malloc does its own memory management on top of that. That's easy to prove wrong by popping ucrtbase.dll into Binary Ninja. The only extra things it does beyond passing the requested size off to HeapAlloc are: handle setting errno, change any request for 0 bytes to requests for 1 byte, and perform retries for the case that it is being used from C++ and the program has installed a new-handler for out-of-memory situations.