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"Extraterrestrial life exists somewhere in the universe." GPT-5.4: Misleading Opus 4.7: Misleading Gemini 3: FALSE Gemini 3 (Retrieval): FALSE Sonar Pro: F

by jawns 5mo ago

"Extraterrestrial life exists somewhere in the universe." GPT-5.4: Misleading Opus 4.7: Misleading Gemini 3: FALSE Gemini 3 (Retrieval): FALSE Sonar Pro: FALSE It's a weird fact claim, because the ground truth is "nobody knows for sure" and that's not one of the available options.

wongarsu 5mo ago
Of the available options, "Misleading" is probably the best, since something that is most likely true but unproven is presented as fact But "unknown or undecidable" should have been a category.
Alifatisk 5mo ago
Isn't misleading the correct option here then?
- arcfour 5mo ago
  False makes sense if you are interpreting it strictly as "has this been proven?"
  - wongarsu 5mo ago
    False is correct, but misleading My implicit assumption is that if you fact-check the fact-check, any label other than "true" means the original fact-check is unacceptable
- throw310822 5mo ago
  No, "misleading" is a statement that is used because it suggests something else. It's a curious category because, differently from true and false, it's not about the statement itself but rather the intention behind its usage or the way it might be understood. It's frankly more of a political judgement than a matter of facts.
  - ertgbnm 5mo ago
    "Shark attacks correlate strongly with ice cream sales" is an entirely true statement that some would argue is also misleading. Misleading should be removed as a category and replaced with a better hedge like "not sure"
- drtz 5mo ago
  True or mostly true could easily be argued from a statistical likelihood perspective: life exists on Earth and, based on what we know, Earth doesn't appear to be all that special in a very large universe. I think you could come up with a reasonable argument for any of the responses, hence the problem with the methodology.
- duckmysick 5mo ago
  The prompt in this study didn't specify what does the Misleading label mean, so the interpretation varies between the models. I mean look at the other responses here from the HN commenters. There's lots of nuance in there.
- mr_luc 5mo ago
  I feel like you’re right, for instance depending on how you define the extra in extraterrestrial. The space station, the Artemis capsule, microbes on interplanetary probes, etc. It could technically be said in a sentence and be true, but it would be misleading to most people.
- kube-system 5mo ago
  Not really. The answer to the claim is just indeterminable. It's like "John is taller than Robert." That isn't "misleading" it is unknown.
drtz 5mo ago
> It's a weird fact claim, because the ground truth is "nobody knows for sure" and that's not one of the available options. It's even weirder to suggest that the disagreement is indicative of a problem. If you asked five very knowledgeable humans on this subject to select the correct answer on a multiple-choice questionnaire, they would almost certainly vary significantly more than these 5 LLMs. Not to say that hallucination isn't a problem, but this is a lousy way to test it.
- dakolli 5mo ago
  What are you talking about, it had the option for nuanced responses, but it chose the more binary responses. It could have chosen no explanations, no qualifiers but instead it showed off LLMs incapability for nuance. These types of experiments prove to me that there is no real "reasoning" happening and "reasoning/thinking" tokens as a concept are mostly there to convince people to use models that consume more tokens and produce more revenue. The output from reasoning models might be more accurate, but its just a consequence of a longer inference runtime, there is no "reasoning" happening, reasoning is just sales/UX bullsh*t.
  - drtz 5mo ago
    > What are you talking about, it had the option for nuanced responses The prompt allowed for exactly four valid outputs and explicitly disallowed explanations and qualifiers. > Output exactly one label: True, > Mostly True, Misleading, or False. > No explanations, no qualifiers. How is that a nuanced response? > These types of experiments prove to me that there is no real "reasoning" happening and "reasoning/thinking" My suggestion is that five presumably reasoning and thinking humans would also have variation in their responses to the exact same prompt.
jug 5mo ago
Looks like an ongoing theme and a very poor benchmark. Not at all the claims I expected.
mock-possum 5mo ago
I would think ‘false’ is the only correct answer a there’s no evidence to prove the claim, so the claim is safely assumed false. Then again maybe that’s why I’m an atheist, not an agnostic?
- Gormo 5mo ago
  "False" isn't correct in strict boolean terms either, since that implies that the inverse is true. Claiming "there is extraterrestrial life in the universe" is false is logically equivalent to claiming that "no extraterrestrial life exists anywhere in the universe" is true. Both statements would have to be interpreted as "false" under your criteria, as neither has any evidence to substantiate it. That leads us to a logical contradiction in which a proposition and its inverse are both regarded as false. If the statement is being interpreted as "it has been proven that extraterrestrial life exists somewhere in the universe", then it's acceptable to say this statement is false, but making evaluations that depend on an implicit qualifier isn't usually a good approach.
  - ruszki 5mo ago
    If we strictly follow logic, then nobody and nothing can claim that anything is true or false. We just stick these labels to things which seems to have high enough probability. The problem is that “high enough” is very-very-very different for different people, topics, and even time.
    - Gormo 5mo ago
      > If we strictly follow logic, then nobody and nothing can claim that anything is true or false. Sure they can. They may or may not be correct, but that's a matter of empirical validation entirely distinct from the logic flow itself. Whether or not a conclusion is logically implied by its hypotheses has nothing to do with whether the input hypotheses are themselves true. Logic is just the reasoning process. > We just stick these labels to things which seems to have high enough probability. The problem is that “high enough” is very-very-very different for different people, topics, and even time. That's true, but outside the scope of logic, and is entirely a matter of semantics.
1718627440 5mo ago
I would argue, FALSE is the correct answer, since this is not a fact, you can know for sure. The logical inverse is also FALSE.
- Gormo 5mo ago
  A proposition and its logical inverse cannot both be false. That's a contradiction. A proposition and its logical inverse can both be unknown, and in fact, a proposition being unknown implies that its logical inverse must also be unknown.
insane_dreamer 5mo ago
I don't see how "misleading" can substitute for "unknown".

by jawns 5mo ago

wongarsu 5mo ago

Of the available options, "Misleading" is probably the best, since something that is most likely true but unproven is presented as fact But "unknown or undecidable" should have been a category.

Alifatisk 5mo ago

Isn't misleading the correct option here then?

arcfour 5mo ago
False makes sense if you are interpreting it strictly as "has this been proven?"
- wongarsu 5mo ago
  False is correct, but misleading My implicit assumption is that if you fact-check the fact-check, any label other than "true" means the original fact-check is unacceptable
throw310822 5mo ago
No, "misleading" is a statement that is used because it suggests something else. It's a curious category because, differently from true and false, it's not about the statement itself but rather the intention behind its usage or the way it might be understood. It's frankly more of a political judgement than a matter of facts.
- ertgbnm 5mo ago
  "Shark attacks correlate strongly with ice cream sales" is an entirely true statement that some would argue is also misleading. Misleading should be removed as a category and replaced with a better hedge like "not sure"
drtz 5mo ago
True or mostly true could easily be argued from a statistical likelihood perspective: life exists on Earth and, based on what we know, Earth doesn't appear to be all that special in a very large universe. I think you could come up with a reasonable argument for any of the responses, hence the problem with the methodology.
duckmysick 5mo ago
The prompt in this study didn't specify what does the Misleading label mean, so the interpretation varies between the models. I mean look at the other responses here from the HN commenters. There's lots of nuance in there.
mr_luc 5mo ago
I feel like you’re right, for instance depending on how you define the extra in extraterrestrial. The space station, the Artemis capsule, microbes on interplanetary probes, etc. It could technically be said in a sentence and be true, but it would be misleading to most people.
kube-system 5mo ago
Not really. The answer to the claim is just indeterminable. It's like "John is taller than Robert." That isn't "misleading" it is unknown.

drtz 5mo ago

> It's a weird fact claim, because the ground truth is "nobody knows for sure" and that's not one of the available options. It's even weirder to suggest that the disagreement is indicative of a problem. If you asked five very knowledgeable humans on this subject to select the correct answer on a multiple-choice questionnaire, they would almost certainly vary significantly more than these 5 LLMs. Not to say that hallucination isn't a problem, but this is a lousy way to test it.

dakolli 5mo ago
What are you talking about, it had the option for nuanced responses, but it chose the more binary responses. It could have chosen no explanations, no qualifiers but instead it showed off LLMs incapability for nuance. These types of experiments prove to me that there is no real "reasoning" happening and "reasoning/thinking" tokens as a concept are mostly there to convince people to use models that consume more tokens and produce more revenue. The output from reasoning models might be more accurate, but its just a consequence of a longer inference runtime, there is no "reasoning" happening, reasoning is just sales/UX bullsh*t.
- drtz 5mo ago
  > What are you talking about, it had the option for nuanced responses The prompt allowed for exactly four valid outputs and explicitly disallowed explanations and qualifiers. > Output exactly one label: True, > Mostly True, Misleading, or False. > No explanations, no qualifiers. How is that a nuanced response? > These types of experiments prove to me that there is no real "reasoning" happening and "reasoning/thinking" My suggestion is that five presumably reasoning and thinking humans would also have variation in their responses to the exact same prompt.

jug 5mo ago

Looks like an ongoing theme and a very poor benchmark. Not at all the claims I expected.

mock-possum 5mo ago

I would think ‘false’ is the only correct answer a there’s no evidence to prove the claim, so the claim is safely assumed false. Then again maybe that’s why I’m an atheist, not an agnostic?

Gormo 5mo ago
"False" isn't correct in strict boolean terms either, since that implies that the inverse is true. Claiming "there is extraterrestrial life in the universe" is false is logically equivalent to claiming that "no extraterrestrial life exists anywhere in the universe" is true. Both statements would have to be interpreted as "false" under your criteria, as neither has any evidence to substantiate it. That leads us to a logical contradiction in which a proposition and its inverse are both regarded as false. If the statement is being interpreted as "it has been proven that extraterrestrial life exists somewhere in the universe", then it's acceptable to say this statement is false, but making evaluations that depend on an implicit qualifier isn't usually a good approach.
- ruszki 5mo ago
  If we strictly follow logic, then nobody and nothing can claim that anything is true or false. We just stick these labels to things which seems to have high enough probability. The problem is that “high enough” is very-very-very different for different people, topics, and even time.
  - Gormo 5mo ago
    > If we strictly follow logic, then nobody and nothing can claim that anything is true or false. Sure they can. They may or may not be correct, but that's a matter of empirical validation entirely distinct from the logic flow itself. Whether or not a conclusion is logically implied by its hypotheses has nothing to do with whether the input hypotheses are themselves true. Logic is just the reasoning process. > We just stick these labels to things which seems to have high enough probability. The problem is that “high enough” is very-very-very different for different people, topics, and even time. That's true, but outside the scope of logic, and is entirely a matter of semantics.

1718627440 5mo ago

I would argue, FALSE is the correct answer, since this is not a fact, you can know for sure. The logical inverse is also FALSE.

Gormo 5mo ago
A proposition and its logical inverse cannot both be false. That's a contradiction. A proposition and its logical inverse can both be unknown, and in fact, a proposition being unknown implies that its logical inverse must also be unknown.

insane_dreamer 5mo ago

I don't see how "misleading" can substitute for "unknown".