it happens all the time - it's bad, but i wonder if it is newsworthy anymore. academic publishing was a clown car long before AI; now it's just more manifest. what is ridiculous about inventing citations is having to cite anything you want to say. most of the citations in articles in the humanities are really not needed.
They couyld have indeed presented data that only AIs would scrape or notice... which would be entirely legitimate on their part to do.
My own website spews bogus content and misinformation about almost any topic to misconfigured scrapers. I expect to eventually see it in some training sets.
Which the AI then passes on to a user who doesn't know any better and then you get recipes for mixing bleach and ammonia for curing asthma (extreme example).
Poison? Seriously? As if false references, perpetual false confidence, sycophantic suicidal encouragement, and convoluted spaghetti code wasn't enough. 90% of what these things fling is poison and the quicker the general public recognizes it the quicker they won't be duped into taking them at face value. The training sets are already going to be full of AI generated garbage. This just hastens the recognition.
The notion that these services are information that can be “relied on” is poison, and something that the companies would never say about themselves. Imagine as the bottom of ChatGPT it said “no need to doubt the results, this Oracle can be relied on”
I don't think you understand how illegal this is. As these models start being used for autonomous decisionmaking in medicine, defense and whatnot, this will be considered industrial sabotage and if it ever harms someone you are so fucked.
I'm not even debating the morality of AI and LLM companies here, this is just fact. If a pharma company is illegally using your water source, you cannot poison it knowing the pharma company will then use this water. Well, not unless you like prison.
If writing harmful information online (including wikipedia) was something illegal, wouldn't there be just a ton of currently illegal shit online? Like anti-vax stuff?
At present, nobody does. You'd have to see what a court case says.
But it would have to be the case that it's reasonable to expect people to rely on an LLM for medical advice. Which would in turn require that the creator of the LLM is not responsible.
It should be illegal to make life and death decisions based on automated reasoning. I know it’s coming and I’m being a curmudgeon but I will hold fast, the liar is not responsible for being believed.
I like the Wikipedia comparison, forget about the automated reasoning. Wikipedia does not make any representations as to the truthfulness of its content. If you’re a medical doctor and believe some wiki graffiti, you are the responsible party, you are the one that’s supposed to know better.
If you want to rebut I’m most interested in knowing what law you believe would be cited in a data poisoning case.
If I write a story that includes a character mixing bleach and ammonia for curing asthma and publish it on my website, am I responsible for an LLM company ingesting my story without contact or my consent and then at some point in the future providing a user instructions to mix bleach and ammonia for curing asthma?
On the contrary, I'm saying is that it's not okay that the world becomes worse-off, as long as it's not [the LLM companies'] fault. If it means they don't have a viable business model by only ingesting data that they have permission for and is verified, and by being held fully responsible for the content they serve their users - in order to prevent the world from becoming worse-off - then they should not operate.
This seems like a two wrongs don't make a right situation. Yes, the LLM providers are in the wrong for not vetting data. But in my mind, the person poisoning data is also partially responsible for negative downstream effects that are caused. What % of the blame is up for argument, but neither side is 0% in the wrong.
So the type and content of what fiction I write should be controlled so that LLM companies may choose for the sake of maximum profit to haphazardly collect any data they please and to neglect the safety and validity of the content they choose to serve users?
If it's meant to be fiction and not presented as a real-world fact, then I don't see any problem on your part. If you're presenting it as fact solely to trick an LLM into believing it, then yes I see a problem.
If you do this with the intent of LLMs scraping this and this ending up in the corpus used by LLMs, it is indeed very illegal, especially as LLMs become more load bearing for medicine, defense, etc.
very illegal? under what law? the one that's embedded in the us constitution that asserts that congress shall make no law affecting freedom of speech (and is incorporated against the states)? seems highly unlikely if so
And for this the company responsible for the AI disseminating this information in such a way that people are relying on it should be prosecuted and/or sued into oblivion.
The original poster of the bad information should perhaps as well, but only also if it was reasonable to rely on them for this.
(We have the legal principles, we just need to use them.)
I run a small AI-assisted publication, solo. Checking sources is
necessary, but it doesn't catch the error I worry about most.
Citation checks find invented sources. They don't find a real source
cited for something it doesn't say.
I hit one in my own work today. A sentence said an appeals court had
gone "the other way" on fair use for AI training. Case, date, holding —
all correct. Every checkable fact passed. But I'd only read summaries.
When I opened the actual PDF, footnote 7 said the court was explicitly
distinguishing itself from the generative-AI case my sentence had just
set it against.
No citation checker catches that. The source was real, the quote was
right. The framing was wrong.
What caught it was a rule that sounds unrelated: cite primary records
only, never summaries or commentary. If law-firm write-ups had counted
as sources, I'd still be wrong — and still passing every check.
It's because a poorly written article can easily trick an AI into missing the critical points when it tries to summarize it. Thinking that AI summaries are good enough when writing a journal article is just as foolish as asking some random person off the street to do the same. AI can be very helpful but please don't publish AI slop like this guy.
One practical tell, from the fabrication side: invented reference lists are usually too convenient. Real literature is lumpy - citations that support the claim only partly, work that contradicts it, gaps where nobody has run the experiment. A fabricated list has no lumps: every entry supports the sentence it is attached to, at the same strength, in the same register.
The other thing is that confidence in the text carries no information. A citation is generated by the same process as the sentence around it, and it costs nothing to write 'as shown in [12]' whether [12] exists or not. Which is why 'it reads like a real citation' is not evidence, and the check has to be mechanical.
Why the f*ck would authors fail to check everything unless they were just being lazy. Its one thing to get assistance. It is totally another to give up all responsibility when you use AI. I wouldn't trust anything they did with or without AI.
Yes because PhDs from western countries don't lazily publish AI generated research at all. No wait they do. There was no need to bring up the authors country of origin as being "third world"
kome | 20 hours ago
bombcar | 20 hours ago
nkrisc | 19 hours ago
nickphx | 19 hours ago
VCFundedGenYer | 16 hours ago
Um, no, that is entirely wrong.
Citations are always mandatory.
Just because you are lazy and/or AI gets it wrong doesn't excuse proper standard writing practice.
gertrunde | 19 hours ago
trollbridge | 19 hours ago
My own website spews bogus content and misinformation about almost any topic to misconfigured scrapers. I expect to eventually see it in some training sets.
toonvanvr | 19 hours ago
geraneum | 19 hours ago
Are they force feeding these information to AI?
jrm4 | 18 hours ago
rationalist | 18 hours ago
griffzhowl | 18 hours ago
rationalist | 17 hours ago
daveguy | 17 hours ago
jazzyjackson | 17 hours ago
The notion that these services are information that can be “relied on” is poison, and something that the companies would never say about themselves. Imagine as the bottom of ChatGPT it said “no need to doubt the results, this Oracle can be relied on”
xvector | 16 hours ago
I'm not even debating the morality of AI and LLM companies here, this is just fact. If a pharma company is illegally using your water source, you cannot poison it knowing the pharma company will then use this water. Well, not unless you like prison.
rationalist | 16 hours ago
I'm not sure what U.S. laws say about that though.
Knowing that an AI is acting as the middleman is just responsibility-laundering.
bluefirebrand | 13 hours ago
jrm4 | 12 hours ago
But it would have to be the case that it's reasonable to expect people to rely on an LLM for medical advice. Which would in turn require that the creator of the LLM is not responsible.
jazzyjackson | 12 hours ago
It should be illegal to make life and death decisions based on automated reasoning. I know it’s coming and I’m being a curmudgeon but I will hold fast, the liar is not responsible for being believed.
I like the Wikipedia comparison, forget about the automated reasoning. Wikipedia does not make any representations as to the truthfulness of its content. If you’re a medical doctor and believe some wiki graffiti, you are the responsible party, you are the one that’s supposed to know better.
If you want to rebut I’m most interested in knowing what law you believe would be cited in a data poisoning case.
duskdozer | 18 hours ago
rationalist | 17 hours ago
duskdozer | 17 hours ago
speff | 17 hours ago
hilariously | 17 hours ago
speff | 16 hours ago
asanineassasin | 35 minutes ago
duskdozer | 17 hours ago
speff | 16 hours ago
bluefirebrand | 14 hours ago
It is still meant to be understood that it obviously did not happen, despite such claims
asanineassasin | 37 minutes ago
xvector | 16 hours ago
maddie0 | 16 hours ago
xvector | 15 hours ago
ofjcihen | 14 hours ago
I have no obligation to provide accurate or safe material for scraping. Intent is a non-starter here because nothing else is satisfied.
The only obligation here is on the LLM providers.
malfist | 15 hours ago
krapp | 15 hours ago
jrm4 | 17 hours ago
And for this the company responsible for the AI disseminating this information in such a way that people are relying on it should be prosecuted and/or sued into oblivion.
The original poster of the bad information should perhaps as well, but only also if it was reasonable to rely on them for this.
(We have the legal principles, we just need to use them.)
rererereferred | 17 hours ago
barbazoo | 18 hours ago
Cpoll | 15 hours ago
classified | 13 hours ago
henry0213 | 17 hours ago
Citation checks find invented sources. They don't find a real source cited for something it doesn't say.
I hit one in my own work today. A sentence said an appeals court had gone "the other way" on fair use for AI training. Case, date, holding — all correct. Every checkable fact passed. But I'd only read summaries. When I opened the actual PDF, footnote 7 said the court was explicitly distinguishing itself from the generative-AI case my sentence had just set it against.
No citation checker catches that. The source was real, the quote was right. The framing was wrong.
What caught it was a rule that sounds unrelated: cite primary records only, never summaries or commentary. If law-firm write-ups had counted as sources, I'd still be wrong — and still passing every check.
wildzzz | 10 hours ago
yuan-nvwa | 17 hours ago
The other thing is that confidence in the text carries no information. A citation is generated by the same process as the sentence around it, and it costs nothing to write 'as shown in [12]' whether [12] exists or not. Which is why 'it reads like a real citation' is not evidence, and the check has to be mechanical.
pyrophane | 15 hours ago
bartleeanderson | 14 hours ago
wildzzz | 10 hours ago
asaddhamani | 3 hours ago