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Company Offering '100% Human-Written, Never AI' Medical Research Is 100% AI
- anigbrowl 2mo agoI got downvoted the other day for saying that anonymous website ownership and perverse financial incentives are bad for the health of the internet.
- GaryBluto 2mo agoMost consider privacy important.
- forgetfreeman 2mo agoIf that were actually true the tech industry would not have minted trillions building a global digital panopticon.
- walrus01 2mo agoMuch of it in the ultimate service of selling very targeted advertising.
- forgetfreeman 2mo agoI think it's the utter banality of the end goal that offends me as much as anything else. The idea that we as a society will sell ourselves this cheaply beggars belief.
- mhitza 2mo agoFor individuals, yes. For service providers, no.
- smsm42 2mo agoWhy not? Nobody forces anybody to hire an anonymous provider. If they still do, they are probably fine with it?
- lesostep 2mo agoThe people working in the company are anonymous from design. There are forms of LLC that hide the owners as well. Trade name is already a form of pseudoanonymity, and it's the highest level of anonymity that can be achieved. The company itself must be publicly known, at least for contract and tax reasons. Buying stuff from truly anonymous provider isn't possible. From a legal standpoint you basically transfer money to them for fun. Since, you know, can't enter any agreement with unknown entity.
- mhitza 2mo agoThere are indeed potentials for annonymous service providers, or ad-hoc services outside governmental control. However for anything consumer protection related, they must not be only transparent, but I'd argue, clearly obvious who is behind the service. In the context of the previous comment there was an implied equivalence between individual and corporation rights to privacy. Large corporations already get lenient passes for breaking the laws and regulations. Let us not propagate ideas that champion for even more things that benefit corporations.
- dcow 2mo agoAnonymity == Privacy is such a huge misconception in our industry it borders on deliberate.
- GaryBluto 2mo agoI'd argue anonymity is a component of privacy.
- applfanboysbgon 2mo agoAnonymity is the ability to interact with other human beings while maintaining your privacy. In other words, it is the ability to use privacy. Privacy alone only gives you the ability to keep a journal of your political opinions without someone reading it. Anonymity gives you the ability to publish those political opinions in public without being persecuted for it by the current or any future group in power. There is no misconception. I would suggest the inverse, that it seems deliberate to try to draw a line between the two and suggest that it makes any sense to have one without the other.
- dcow 2mo ago^ case in point
- coffeefirst 2mo agoYes, I would agree that privacy is important, that anonymity is valuable to the freedom of speech, and that OP is also right about the health of the web. Which means we have a big problem.
- applfanboysbgon 2mo agoOP may be right about the health of the web, but for the wrong reasons. Anonymous website ownership has absolutely nothing to do with anything causing the biggest problems on the internet.
- anigbrowl 2mo agoI think scams are bad actually.
- anigbrowl 2mo agoWithout limits? If you walk into a store or office the name of the business owner is a matter of public record. I don't want to extrapolate too much from your comment, but it seems like we're moving toward a web where only law enforcement are able to find out who runs a particular website, which is not great for the public but massively concentrates power in the hands of the state.
- jrflowers 2mo agoAll of the worst websites on the internet are owned by people that are household names
- pjc50 2mo agoTwo separate things. People should be allowed to be anonymous for free, especially in an environment where anonymous harassment is free and legal, up to and including collusion with law enforcement "SWATing").
- RevEng 2mo agoI think this will become ever more common as AI improves. We used to joke, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," but now that is clearly true for AI agents. They can automate every part of the process, from domain and hosting registration, to web content creation, to responses to emails and even phone calls. Entire personas are trivial to create and maintain. This is what many companies are openly trying to do as cost cutting measures, but taken to its extreme you end up with entire companies generating income that are entirely agent driven. So long as the tokens cost less than the revenues they can generate, people will deploy these to passively make money for them, just like the early 2000s when there were entire webpages just present to show ads to unsuspecting visitors.
- NordStreamYacht 2mo agoMy favourite from that era was the million pixel page where you paid $1 for a pixel which would link back to your own website.
- rootusrootus 2mo agoIIRC the guy behind that actually did sell every spot. But they were blocks of pixels with recognizable banners to click on.
- GolfPopper 2mo agoSo the government is going to track down everyone involved with running Research Gold and prosecute them for fraud, right?
- floren 2mo agoIt's got "Gold" in the name, it may very well be a Trump operation.
- jbethune 2mo agoIt's interesting to notice which fields try to garner positive publicity by emphasizing that they DON'T use AI. There is increasing negativity about AI generally but it is quite revealing for an organization to try to make their refusal to use it a big part of their identity. Maybe I can start offering artisanal software development services to go after that sweet hipster dollar - code done 100% by hand, cruelty-free.
- ElProlactin 2mo agoI think there are two problems: 1. Most of the negativity about AI seems to relate to the economic effects, not the technology itself. 2. From what I've seen, the average person is still unable to identify AI created content, websites, etc. The website this post is about is clearly vibe coded (looks like everything including the copy is from Claude) but I'd guess that only a small fraction of the people who see it will recognize that.
- watwut 2mo agoPeople hate the technology, how it is used and talked about . Way more then its economic effects so far.
- palmotea 2mo agoYeah. LLMs (and the associated hype) are changing my job for the worse. While I agree it's useful sometimes, it's lead to a huge amount of pressure to eliminate the fun parts of my job (design and coding) and replace it with more soul-sucking drudgery (code reviews). There's also been a general increase in pressure that seems like it could lead to burnout through decrease in slack and/or stress from a reduction in quality and understanding.
- happymellon 2mo agoYou missed the environmental impact. In the UK we are in droughts, and we are being told to restrict our water usage. Somehow if you run a data centre then the rules don't apply. If the water company is telling me to restrict how much I wash my clothes then corps need to feel some of the pressure too.
- ElProlactin 2mo agoOne thing that I find useful is to look at the about page, as well as terms of service or privacy policy, of any website. If there's no entity named, or you can't verify that a named entity actually exists, it's a red flag. In this case, there's no individual or company named anywhere that I can see. Not on the About page, and not in any of the legal agreements. And the phone number looks like it's a VoIP number from Onvoy, a major wholesaler, which is a yellow flag.
- NewsGotHacked 2mo agoAgreed. Also the address listed on the about page is looks to be to the Texas Sculpture Garden in Frisco Texas. Sounds like a park, not an office.
- shevy-java 2mo agoI had that with a book some time ago that was fully AI generated. First time I was quite naive and did not understand why I could not find the book on amazon. (And they did not state that it was AI-generated; one could tell, though, because the structure made no real sense and it was just AI slop spam as "content".)
- Maxion 2mo ago> And the phone number looks like it's a VoIP number from Onvoy, a major wholesaler, which is a yellow flag. I mean, that's a red red flag. SME you expect to find a phone number, larger companies and especially B2C you expect these days to not find one at all. For very large ones, you expect to find a lot of phone numbers.
- amanzi 2mo agoEven the website looks AI generated. Lots of cards with hover effects, icons in square boxes, the button shapes and behaviours, and just the general look and feel has Claude written all over it.
- ggm 2mo agoSurely the FTC would be all over this for truth in advertising, even if the FDA wasn't. The "services for medical researchers" reads like "tell us the result you want and the level of journal prestige and we'll price an outcome for you"
- p00dles 2mo agoNot long ago companies claiming “100% AI-powered” services were secretly relying on humans because the tech wasn’t good enough. Now, the opposite is true - AI has gotten so good, people are trying to pass AI work off as “100% human-powered.” To me this remarkable inversion in a short period of time demonstrates how powerful these models can be; even if AI is overhyped and the financing/economics seem like a stack of cards, this example is driving home the point to me of just how far these models have come.
- n4r9 2mo ago> AI has gotten so good, people are trying to pass AI work off as “100% human-powered.” I'd put it differently. Yes AI is better than it used to be but it's still the lazy choice; human-powered is better but more expensive.
- mcphage 2mo ago> AI has gotten so good, people are trying to pass AI work off as “100% human-powered.” I’m not sure the company in this article qualifies—it seemed immediately obvious that it wasn’t real.
- shaohua 2mo agolove the irony
- tkgally 2mo agoOne of the humans mentioned in the article, Sebastian Rowan, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of New Hampshire, is quoted as saying “But a fundamental problem with using AI, even specialized tools, for anything is their tendency to hallucinate, which as far as I know is believed to be an unsolvable problem.” I don’t believe that’s an unsolvable problem. I’ve done some private experiments where I had Claude, over many sessions, design and implement original research projects in fields in the humanities and social sciences, with a research paper as the final product of each project. I included detailed instructions on research ethics in CLAUDE.md and other project documentation, insisting, among other things, that it double- and triple-check all citations and references to make sure not only that the referenced papers existed but also that they actually said what the paper Claude wrote claimed they said. I gave Claude an OpenRouter API key and a daily budget, and it outsourced much of that adversarial checking to models made by other companies. In my checks of its final papers, I found no instances of hallucinated or otherwise invalid references. At various steps in the research process, Claude also, on its own initiative, had other models critique its research designs, data analyses, written drafts, etc., and it made changes based on that feedback. The final papers were, to my eye, well done, if quite narrow in their scope and claims. The ethical alignment I imposed on it, as well as its lack of ego, seemed to keep it from making even weak claims if they could not be rigorously justified. I’m a retired academic, and I no longer have any need or desire to produce research papers myself, with or without AI. Rather, I am interested in the impact of AI tools on the research process, particularly on how research and researchers will be evaluated in the years ahead. I did not, and will not, release any of those papers written for me by Claude, though I have released what it produced for another research project I had it do, on a topic in the philosophy of language. In case anyone is interested: https://tkgally.github.io/ai-semantics/ https://tkgally.github.io/ai-semantics/
- mcphage 2mo ago> insisting, among other things, that it double- and triple-check all citations and references to make sure not only that the referenced papers existed but also that they actually said what the paper Claude wrote claimed they said So your solution to get it to not hallucinate was to ask it not to hallucinate? And you suppose that this was a novel approach? What, that people just hadn’t tried that before?
- shevy-java 2mo agoSo they are not telling the truth.
- mnmnmn 2mo ago[dead]