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Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source. I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will pus
by regenschutz 8mo ago
Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.
I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.
- icf80 8mo ago"Facebook" :)
- mrbluecoat 8mo agoI initially read it as Facebook as well and almost celebrated :D
- mikemarsh 8mo agoSurely there's a lot of CIA involvement there too ;-)
- regenschutz 8mo agoOh wow, didn't at all notice that while typing lol. I guess my swipe-to-type skills aren't as good as I thought they were
- ekianjo 8mo ago> Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source. A source of propaganda? There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.
- Sharlin 8mo agoThe Factbook has always been widely regarded as a reliable source of information.
- lyu07282 8mo agoI would hope that most people do understand that the CIA is a heavily biased source to use on information on other countries.. like wtf?
- ceejayoz 8mo agoHeavily biased sources can still provide useful facts, if you're careful. For example, the IDF now accepts Hamas's death toll estimates after decrying them as inflated for years. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.premium/idf-accepts-gaza-health-ministry-estimate-of-over-70-000-palestinians-killed-in-the-war/0000019c-0918-dec4-adfd-fd5dde830000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...
- ekianjo 8mo agoBy the Western world aligned with the US?
- kergonath 8mo ago> There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation. Even then, political motivation in itself does not make it inaccurate. It’s easy to see why a liberal democracy supposed to defend liberty across the globe would be interested in making facts accessible. Facts and education are the best way to fight obscurantism and totalitarianism. It’s also easy to see why a regime sliding back towards autocracy would have no interest in doing it. If they were competent, they could have continued pretending they cared and actually use it as a propaganda tool. Same with Radio Liberty and the others.
- lyu07282 8mo ago[flagged]
- im3w1l 8mo agoYou're too naive if you think it's completely true, but too cynical if you think it's completely false.
- GuinansEyebrows 8mo agoonly as cynical as the CIA :)
- lyu07282 8mo agoWhat a joke, everyone here is so fucking brainwashed its like talking to a north korean peasant with a radio in their bedroom they can't turn off.
- schnable 8mo agothere used to be a higher alignment in the US between political motivations and morality.
- mangodrunk 8mo ago>It’s easy to see why a liberal democracy supposed to defend liberty across the globe would be interested in making facts accessible. Who is supposed to defend liberty across the globe? Do you think the US has been doing that and should be doing that? The point of OP was that the facts from the CIA can’t be trusted. That they can lie about the facts.
- hk__2 8mo agoAt least Wikipedia is supposed to cite its sources, while AIs don’t.
- GorbachevyChase 8mo agoHave you used one recently? The big providers all cite sources if give a research prompt.
- sofixa 8mo agoSometimes they hallucinate them, or if they exist, sources include blatant nonsense (like state owned propaganda, such as RT) / don't support the claims made by the output.
- maximilianthe1 8mo agowhat's worse is when they cite clearly LLM generated articles from web
- keeganpoppen 8mo agowtf are you conversing with LLMs that you regularly are running into "state owned propaganda" in the references? my "blatant nonsense" detector is going off...
- olyjohn 8mo agoMy favorite is when it cites 5 sources, and 1 of them is a real source, and then the other 4 are short form junk that point to the first one as the source. So basically its just picked one article and summarized it for you and not picked any info from any other places. Oh and bonus points when I type the exact same prompt into a search engine, and that 1 source is the top search result anyways.
- sofixa 8mo agohttps://www.euronews.com/next/2025/11/04/ai-chatbots-are-spewing-russian-propaganda-study-finds https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/11/04/ai-chatbots-are-spe... Original study: https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/investigation-talking-points-when-chatbots-surface-russian-state-media/ https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/investigation-tal...
- davidguetta 8mo ago[flagged]
- JKCalhoun 8mo agoI guess your sarcasm is not popular in this thread. Perhaps Musk-fatigue.
- pseudalopex 8mo agoMost sarcasm worsens discussion. The comment guidelines say Don't be snarky.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- davidguetta 8mo agoIts not snarky. Grok if an awesome alternative view if you accept that you should use your brain to make your own opinion and not just accept wikipedia (which can be wrong) as truth.
- davidguetta 8mo agoIts not sarcasm. Grok if an awesome alternative view if you accept that you should use your brain to make your own opinion and not just accept wikipedia (which can be wrong) as truth.
- belter 8mo agoSee the positive. At least you would not get a fail on your school essay about Greenland...
- sofixa 8mo ago> Wikipedia There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia, at least in the main languages. It's crowdsourced and has citations (and where there aren't "citation needed" help identify that). It gives you superficial, in depth and factual information, with links to sources for more details if needed.
- PLenz 8mo agoThere's nothing at all wrong with Wikipedia but it needs sources to cite since it doesn't allow original research and the World Factbook is an important one.
- hexagonsuns 8mo ago>There's nothing at all wrong with Wikipedia Well, except for the very obvious political bias https://manhattan.institute/article/new-study-finds-political-bias-embedded-in-wikipedia-articles https://manhattan.institute/article/new-study-finds-politica...
- sofixa 8mo ago> Findings show that Wikipedia entries are more likely to attach negative sentiment to terms representative of right-leaning political orientation than to their left-leaning counterparts Is that a bias or just reality? Right leaning politicians in the US include people paying underage girls for sex, people screaming about "Jewish Space lasers", people obviously stealing money in plain sight with crypto pumps and dumps, people running away from responsibility, people getting caught engaging in sexual acts in public, and on and on and on. Their left-wing equivalents are... extremely mild by comparison. What, some run of the mill corruption and sexual comments that resulted in resignations? If go past "right wing is associated with more negative things", and look into what those negative things are, you'd realise it's just reality. Just because there are two parties and two categories of political leanings doesn't mean they are somehow equal.
- elzbardico 8mo ago
- detourdog 8mo agoThe CIA World Factbook was one of the major sites to access for information using Gopher. I discovered it using Gopher and it was proof to me of the usefulness of Internet. I would cite it as a reason that someone might want to access the internet.
- xphos 8mo agoCan you add context on what Gopher is for the unknowning? I searched for it but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) is the only seemingly relavent thing I found not sure if thats exactly what your refering too?
- detourdog 8mo agoIt predated the World Wide Web as a client for browsing. It was developed at the University of Minnesota and named for the School's mascot. The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data. One would access an initial site by typing in it's IP address or domain name. One could then follow the gopher links until exhaustion or all the links on that site were visited. There was a period of time before the WWW was graphical and I found gopher far superior for browsing. One had to download files and then view them locally using local tools. One could even follow a gopher link to the WWW. The splash page had the slogan "Welcome to the World Wide Web there is no top or bottom". This could not be said of Gopher sites where each site had to be connected to directly and all the links on the site could be visited. Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical. This made the Gopher less useful since it was stuck as terminal browser. The IP address made the machine one was browsing from addressable to every host on the internet. This made inline graphics more practical because they could be rendered in line while browsing.
- xphos 8mo agoGosh that actually sounds a amazing I am always annoyed that I have to leave terminal so much to explore I can understand the common person being daunted by that but a terminal accessible browser client sounds lovely for a lot of use cases
- KellyCriterion 8mo agoIsnt it already in AI as the prior version were publicly and should be in training corpus?
- pseudalopex 8mo agoThe World Factbook was updated weekly. This was because facts changed.
- ToucanLoucan 8mo agoEvery time an article like this gets posted some commenter INEVITABLY brings up "isn't this solved because AI" and god it is so depressing. Apparently a whole lot of people out there existing in the world genuinely think fucking LLMs are going to be reliable stewards of knowledge. We are fucking cooked.
- cududa 8mo agoSure but that doesn't mean it'll perfectly retrieve information it's trained on. There's a lot of conflicting sources, hallucinations, etc.
- therealdrag0 8mo agoAi training can be thought of like human training (school), much of what you learn shapes you but you forget the details. We need to continue to have real sources of info.
- hackingonempty 8mo agoNo worries, we can rely on our Dear Leader and his team of experts to keep us informed.