I’ve learned that when my impulse is to say “It sounds like something X would do,” it often leads me down very wrong paths.
Just because the vibes point in that direction often doesn’t mean it’s the truth.
This is exactly how misinformation starts and real people pay the price for generations. Just look at the MSG (monosodium glutamate) untruth that has hurt many Chinese restaurants and Chinese Americans over the years. Misinformation is not victimless.
That is quite literally why misinformation spreads.
perfect description of what LLMs are best at
> The Verge put the original 586-word Reddit post through several free online AI detectors, in addition to Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The results were mixed: Copyleaks, GPTZero, Pangram, Gemini, and Claude all pegged it as likely AI-generated, but ZeroGPT and QuillBot both reported it as human-written. ChatGPT played it down the middle.
(Is it any wonder why people fall in love with bots that always agree with them?)
LLMs aren't intelligent. They're just very fancy math and a lot of smoke and mirrors.
So either A) LLMs are intentionally, universally making their content look AI-generated despite having the capability to do otherwise or B) LLMs cannot reliably detect AI output and their responses on the subject are complete BS.
Those are two very different classes of problems. You do not automatically get one if you have the other, in any resource constrained situation. Yes, you can infinitely iterate a RNG into a content producer given a classifier, but that presumes infinite resources.
I'm a developer for a major food delivery app
There was no investigation, they just asked an AI and published what the AI said.
Plus, I'm finding other sources that did more investigation: https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/an-ai-generated-reddit-post...
The best web archive is 22 hours in (.is is 2 hours with same top) and the top believes the post. Nihilist and a NPC failure to understand tech and industry[1] FTW
https://web.archive.org/web/20260103035501/https://news.ycom...
[1] Both programming and business logic are rubbish in the post. A childhish view of the world from people who have never been there.
[edit] If Hacker News can show posts archived after they drop off page x they should do that.
If Hacker News wants to pretend they are archiving history show an accessible frozen copy. If we can't delete old posts because the history matters, this does too.
It wouldn't hurt to watch voting real time either over 24-48 hours. This is scrape-able if collected real time. Data project left to reader. No idea if you'd see anything. India votes different to the USA, you might see that.
As for "the famous Dropbox post", if you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863, there was nothing fake about it.
If you're seeing their other comments, it must be because you have 'showdead' turned on in your profile. Anyone is welcome to turn that on and see all the comments that have been killed for various reasons, but it's important to understand that if you do, you're signing up to see the worst that the internet brings to HN.
As I mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538728, users sometimes forget that they turned 'showdead' on, then wonder why they're seeing such dreadful stuff in the comments. Could it be that that's what happened in this case?
Yes, it was: https://www.theverge.com/transportation/853018/a-developer-f...
"A developer for a ‘major food delivery app’ says the ‘algorithms are rigged against you."
"There’s some debate as to whether the claims are as bad as the OP makes them seem, but it seems like there’s general agreement that the gist of the post is legit."
And, yet, they don't even mention it in their original post. They haven't issued a correction. Isn't this journalism 101?
There are plenty of other signs this story is likely fake. The author claiming to be posting from a library on New Years' Day (most government buildings are closed) and was responding over 10 hours on the account. He's using a throwaway and a "burner laptop" at the library, but he also says he put his two weeks' notice in yesterday (also odd that this is on New Years' Eve) which would make identifying him trivial.
Fake stories get to the front page of Reddit every day, I wish journalists were pointing out the actual signs not to trust something to act as a better example.
He gave his notice on NYE? Oh, he's probably just fudging that so he's not caught. He doesn't care about getting caught but he's on a burner laptop? Oh, people do weird things when they're stressed. And on and on.
Then, of course, the ultimate fallback: Well it sounds like something they would do. So even if most of this is made up, the bad things are still probably true.
Try with some more media criticality next time.
It's Reddit; of course it's fake.
I do congratulate this author, though. If posted it to a different site, I would believe it.
...Congratulations, clanker!
I am irrationally irritated by this.
I recommend reading https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax... instead. It offers better reasoning, and an honest reflection about how close they were to getting taken in by the original Reddit post.
> “On the other hand, LLMs are weapons of mass fabrication,” said Alexios Mantzarlis, co-author of the Indicator, a newsletter about digital deception. “Fabulists can now bog down reporters with evidence credible enough that it warrants review at a scale not possible before. The time you spent engaging with this made up story is time you did not spend on real leads. I have no idea of the motive of the poster — my assumption is it was just a prank — but distracting and bogging down media with bogus leads is also a tactic of Russian influence operations (see Operation Overload).”
Crazy new times ahead.
Like there's the oft-debunked "factoid" that says that the Windows Start Menu is written in react native... While the fact itself may be false, the fact that so many people readily believed it says a lot about the start menu.
If someone were to make a similar claim about something like HN was built in react then almost everyone here would instantly fact check.
coloneltcb•1mo ago