News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The Wo... by andy_ppp on Thursday February 05, 2026 @04:47PM (#46905836)
ChatGPT says his experience did make him think about bureaucracy in organisations leading to untruths but to say it’s the basis of 1984 is clearly absurd, it’s a much more complex book than an allegory of propaganda for the BBC.
Re:CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The Wo... by hananova on Thursday February 05, 2026 @10:50PM (#46908868)
If I wanted to know what ChatGPT says, I’m more than capable of asking it myself thank you.
Re:CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The Wo... by gspr on Friday February 06, 2026 @01:57AM (#46909937)
I don't think anyone minds if you use an LLM to try to track down information like this. But the LLM's output is not what we want. That's merely a clue for you on your quest to find a proper source.

Even school children in the 90s were told that "the search engine" was ludicrous to give as a source. You should know that your LLM is the same.

Re:CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The Wo... by Kim_Bruning on Friday February 06, 2026 @05:39AM (#46911258)
So asking an LLM to work from memory will get you the general vibe of the thing from sources. The vibe as a vibe is actually very useful! It's a new variant of counting google hits for a term. But it doesn't really tell you more than that; and you can't treat it as fact.

Same as with a smart person working from memory. They're smart, and their memory is good, but they could misremember after all. [1]

If you ask your LLM to execute a search for you, congrats, you're one step further, now it can summarize the search results for you. But now you're back at the point you were before LLMs existed and we all relied on google. Just because google says something, doesn't mean it's true.

Now both you and the LLM need to go work through the sources and figure out what's actually going on.

The "ChatGPT says it's clearly absurd..." is missing the word "...because..." , and roughly a paragraph of support

[1] (Before you complain: I'm not anthropomorphizing. You're anthropocentrizing! )