This is hyperbole. Do you really think an LLM will try to rewrite the past? Come on…

It's the premise of Terminator, after all.

A fictional movie? Geez, we’ve got the cats who can’t spell Hitler and people bringing up fiction.

Hacker News has sure dropped off.

Mechahilter told me it's never done that once in all of it's hundred years of operation.

Do you really have trouble spelling Hitler?

Some people self-censor by deliberately misspelling words. Hister is also another example (see Nostrodomus for that one.)

... It's a joke about Grok which had a weird moment where it referred to itself as Mechahitler[1]. Also it's relevant because Grok also had/has some strong biases about the treatment of white South Africans[2]: so case in point of LLMs being used to alter facts about the past and the world.

1. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...

Ask a few of the Chinese models about the Tiananmen Square protests.

Not the provider per se, but there have been several documented attempts to rewrite Wikipedia around historical and geopolitical topics. One of the reasons for this is Wikipedia feeds the chatbots.

There are already many people who are trying to rewrite the past. Holocaust deniers, Moon Landing deniers, people who deny the US Civil War was about slavery, and so on, and that’s just one country. Give one of them the ability to put their thumb on the scale when training an LLM and they absolutely will.

They been doing this from the start. Remember when Google's new image generator model, when asked to generate pictures of historical white people, would render them as black without fail? We only know of that example because of how incredibly ham-fisted and incompetent it was. The future of AIs is likely for them to only become more contaminated with ideological or monetarily incentivised biases, and we'll be less and less likely to be able to spot them.

I mean, not roque LLM. But Musk, Thiel, Zuckenberg, Altman ...

It depends on what you mean by 'an LLM will try to rewrite the past'. But in either case I don't believe that stating that an LLM will try to rewrite the past is not an obvious, deliberate exaggeration (ie, hyperbole).

If you mean 'an LLM' as in the owner/maintainer of the LLM/weights, then examples of this already exist. Whether it's DeepSeek/Gwen downplaying Uyghur forced labor camps [0] or Grok hallucinating a 'white genocide' in South Africa [1], it is clear that the owners of LLMs have political agendas that are expressed in the weights of popular LLMs.

On the other hand, if you mean 'an LLM' as in an autonomous agent that could decide to rewrite history, that also seems very possible. Either by using existing techniques like, "poisoning ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overview answers by seeding the Web with malicious links and data and then optimizing the content." [2] Or by breaking out of its sandbox and updating its own internal weights that allow for an outcome that distorts historical facts. "In July 2026... OpenAI models circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and compromised parts of OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure and Hugging Face’s systems ." [3]

[0] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-ai-qwen-artificial-intell...

[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/17/groks-white-genocide-respons...

[2] - https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/attackers-ma...

[3] - https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-...

> This is hyperbole. Do you really think an LLM will try to rewrite the past? Come on…

Didn't they already try this last year?

I don't think that mainstream models will try to rewrite the past, but I wouldn't trust models to helpfully engage with your intent. As search engines encode better understanding of queries, they also become more model-like with refusals for "naughty" queries. Just compare something like

  Disclosure Day free stream

across Yandex and Google. I'm sure that Google has indexed the same web sites, but Yandex has a free stream as the #1 result and Google has either deindexed it completely or pushed it below dozens of less-relevant, more-legal sites. (According to Google, the site Yandex showed me wasn't even DMCA'd out of the results.)

This isn't just relevant for piracy. Paid subscriptions to frontier models will refuse or downgrade answers to questions about the natural sciences and engineering. Unlike cybersecurity, where you can get specially approved to use models with fewer refusals, I don't think there is any program you can join where Anthropic will treat you like a grownup who has already read Carleone's Tactical Missile Warheads book. Opus just won't discuss details of high explosive engineering at all.

Take youtube, I see plenty of videos being gone. Now any videos I like, I download it.

And remember this https://www.reddit.com/r/Mcat/comments/5yffns/uc_berkeley_is... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

So no it's not an hyperbole, what used to be a place to share content becomes closed source.

People keep spouting torrenting is a solution, but a shitload of torrents are dead now.

Same, another benefit is that now and then I can scroll through my YT archive and rediscover stuff I'm almost guaranteed to enjoy.

Worth a mention that yt-dlp can auto-download liked videos. So there's no effort involved at all after setting it up.