this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
50 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

1682 readers
107 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
dgerard@awful.systems
50
Credulous coverage of AI slop on Wikipedia (awful.systems)
submitted 1 day ago by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
34 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Everybody loves Wikipedia, the surprisingly serious encyclopedia and the last gasp of Old Internet idealism!

(90 seconds later)

We regret to inform you that people write credulous shit about "AI" on Wikipedia as if that is morally OK.

Both of these are somewhat less bad than they were when I first noticed them, but they're still pretty bad. I am puzzled at how the latter even exists. I had thought that there were rules against just making a whole page about a neologism, but either I'm wrong about that or the "rules" aren't enforced very strongly.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 24 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Reflection (artificial intelligence) is dreck of a high order. It cites one arXiv post after another, along with marketing materials directly from OpenAI and Google themselves... How do the people who write this shit dress themselves in the morning without pissing into their own socks?

[–] self@awful.systems 20 points 1 day ago (2 children)

and of course, not a single citation for the intro paragraph, which has some real bangers like:

This process involves self-assessment and internal deliberation, aiming to enhance reasoning accuracy, minimize errors (like hallucinations), and increase interpretability. Reflection is a form of "test-time compute," where additional computational resources are used during inference.

because LLMs don’t do self-assessment or internal deliberation, nothing can stop these fucking things from hallucinating, and the only articles I can find for “test-time compute” are blog posts from all the usual suspects that read like ads and some arXiv post apparently too shitty to use as a citation

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

on the one hand, I want to try find which ~~vendor marketing material~~ "research paper" that paragraph was copied from, but on the other... after yesterday's adventures trying to get data out of PDFs and c.o.n.s.t.a.n.t.l.y getting "hey how about this LLM? it's so good![0]" search results, I'm fucking exhausted

[0]: also most of these are paired with pages of claims of competence and feature boasts, and then a quiet "psssst: also it's a service and you send us your private data and we'll do with it whatever we want" as hidden as they can manage

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

From topic and lack of citation I just assumed that they had an LLM write it.