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Has it been shown or admitted that the quotes were hallucinations, or is it the presumption that all made up content is a hallucination now?
by Lerc 9mo ago
Has it been shown or admitted that the quotes were hallucinations, or is it the presumption that all made up content is a hallucination now?
- Pay08 9mo agoYou could read the original blog post...
- Lerc 9mo agoHow could that prove hallucinations? It could only possibly prove that they are not. If the quotes are in the original post then they are not hallucinations. If they are not in the post they could be caused by something is not a LLM. Misquotes and fabricated quotes have existed long before AI, And indeed, long before computers.
- DonHopkins 9mo ago[dead]
- Lerc 9mo agoThere is no goalpost moving here. I read the article. My claim is as it has always been. If we accept that the misquotes exist it does not follow that they were caused by hallucinations? To tell that we would still need additional evidence. The logical thing to ask would be; Has it been shown or admitted that the quotes were hallucinations?
- Dylan16807 9mo agoYou've deeply misunderstood their argument in some way I can't quite figure out. It's simple. We know the quotes are fake, but we don't know for sure if they're hallucinations. The blog post does not resolve this uncertainty. And yes other answers are reasonably plausible. You said in another comment that they're "retreating" and "refusing to read" and... no. Your insults are not justified at all.
- DonHopkins 9mo ago[flagged]
- tempestn 9mo agoI think you're missing their point. The question you're replying to is, how do we know that this made up content is a hallucination. Ie., as opposed to being made up by a human. I think it's fairly obvious via Occam's Razor, but still, they're not claiming the quotes could be legit.
- DonHopkins 9mo ago[dead]
- Lerc 9mo agoYou seem to be quite certain that I had not read the article, yet I distinctly remember doing do. By what proceess do you imagine I arrived at the conclusion that the article suggested that published quotes were LLM hallucinations when that was not mentioned in the article title? You accuse me of performative skepticism, yet all I think is that it is better to have evidence over assumptions, and it is better to ask if that evidence exists. It seems a much better approach than making false accusations based upon your own vibes, I don't think Scott Shambaugh went to that level though.
- DonHopkins 8mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/ https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio... >On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them. That is a serious failure of our standards. Direct quotations must always reflect what a source actually said.
- jurgenburgen 9mo ago
- vor_ 9mo agoAnother red flag is that the article used repetitive phrases in an AI-like way: "...it illustrates exactly the kind of unsupervised output that makes open source maintainers wary." followed later on by "[It] illustrates exactly the kind of unsupervised behavior that makes open source maintainers wary of AI contributions in the first place."
- joquarky 9mo agoI used to be skeptical that AI generated text could be reliably detected, but after a couple years of reading it, there are cracks starting to form in that skepticism.
- joquarky 9mo agoGen AI only produces hallucinations (confabulations). The utility is that the infrenced output tends to be right much more often than wrong for mainstream knowledge.