Re:Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs
by scruple on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @04:13PM
(#50172006)
Once this provenance trail, that humans use to trace claims back to an accountable source, is dead and buried under automated sludge, "just pick people to trust" stops working as a viable strategy. How do you even tell who is actually talking?
Re:Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs
by Forgeties79 on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:23PM
(#50172875)
Seriously we’ve got Reddit now straight up translating foreign language comments with AI and without stating they did it. That is a massive decision to make, and I feel like no one cares.
Re:Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs
by tsimionescu on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @09:46AM
(#50180883)
I don't think it's necessarily so. I view it more like garbage collection algorithms - the amount of garbage doesn't actually matter, you should only be looking at the roots of trust and down from there, and those will generally only lead you to more trustworthy content. The WSJ won't randomly link to fake TikTok accounts.
Now, the bigger problem happens if some of the trusted institutions and people go bad, for various reasons. If the NYT got bought out by Alex Jones, it might start mixing in lots of slop - but this is also a pre-existing problem.
Also, I didn't say you need to access high quality sources for everything, I again kind of said the opposite: you choose who to trust for what, and that's that. There is nothing more, and has never been anything more, that you can do. Sometimes people and sources you trust will still lie to you, or be wrong, and you'll know wrong information - this is also unavoidable.
Of course, the more important some information is to you, the more effort you should actually spend trying to verify with multiple trusted sources. Some weird fact about cats you saw in a TikTok? Fine to just believe it. Trying to figure out who to vote for, or if the elections were stolen? Probably worth checking a few more sources. Read some definition for a word on Wikipedia, or some old historical event? Probably fine. Reading about an even slightly controversial topic? Check the actual sources, don't trust the snapshot you happen to see*.
Of course, the way LLMs work is antithetical to this, as information provided directly by the LLM is not coming from any human source you can decide if you should trust or not. So you shouldn't trust it for anything important, unless you can verify. But for information or disinformation on the web, nothing has changed, except maybe the quantities.
*for a silly example: the exact definition of the word "electrocution" is a slightly controversial topic - whether electrocution refers to any (significant) injury caused by electricity, or only death. Pedants soemwaht regularly edit the article on Wikipedia to remove the "or serious injury" part of the definition, despite it carrying a link to the OED that includes this mention.