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Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01100-y
55•latexr•1h ago

Comments

daoboy•1h ago
It sounds like there wasn't really a counter narrative for the models to learn from. This feature of how llms accumulate information is already being gamed by seeding the internet with preferred narratives.

I'm not sure how many Medium articles, blog posts and reddit threads I need to put out before grok starts telling everyone my widget is the best one ever made, but it's a lot cheaper than advertising.

21asdffdsa12•1h ago
Can a model not just ignor all things that have no counter-argument by default? Like - if there are not flat earthers, widly debunked, drop the idea of a spherical earth? It only exists if it was fought over?
linzhangrun•1h ago
It's not very realistic. It would significantly impact the user experience. Many things have not been fully discussed on the internet; there isn't that much luxury of corpus data available.
21asdffdsa12•1h ago
But then mono-opinion- aka certainty - is actually peak uncertainty? Could that number of occurrence be baked into as a sort of detrimental weight?
simmerup•59m ago
We need to give the LLMs robot bodies so they can practise medicine and see the illnesses that do and don’t exist first hand
saidnooneever•1h ago
you would just game it the same way then, and how would it know who won an internet argument? how can it prove who is telling the truth and whos... hallucinating?
sublinear•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-realism
pjc50•45m ago
> drop the idea of a spherical earth

I think I see a problem here.

sublinear•1h ago
This is the future of advertising, and that was always the true purpose of having LLMs become the first choice for user search.

I seriously do not understand why people keep falling for this. These tools are not made free or cheap out of the kindness of their heart.

teaearlgraycold•57m ago
I’ve seen an estimate before and it’s in the low 10s.
pjc50•38m ago
People really like using the word "narrative". I guess we're creatures of story.

But this really highlights how much we've been benefiting from living in a high-trust society, where people don't just "go on the internet and tell lies" - filtered by the existing anti-spam and anti-SEO measures intended to cut out the 80% of the internet where people do just make things up to sell products.

LLMs are extremely post-structuralist. They really force the user to decide whether to pick the beautiful eternal fountain of plausible looking text with no ground truth, or a much harder road of distrust, verification, and old-school social proof.

eqvinox•31m ago
I'm not sure "being gamed" is the lens I would see this particular instance through. People (some at least) have gotten into their heads that they can ask LLMs objective questions and get objectively correct answers. The LLM companies are doing very little to dissuade them of that belief.

Meanwhile, LLMs are essentially internet regurgitation machines, because of course they are, that's what they do. Which makes them useless for getting "hard truth" answers especially in contested or specialized fields.

I'm honestly afraid of the impact of this. The internet has enough herd bullshit on it as it is. (e.g. antivaxxers, flat earthers, electrosensitivity, vitamin/supplement junk, etc.) We don't need that amplified.

latexr•5m ago
> I'm not sure how many Medium articles, blog posts and reddit threads I need to put out

Probably not that many.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...

wiredfool•1h ago
This is a strong contender for an Ignobel.
simmerup•1h ago
You’ve seen people game adsense

It’s gunna be even wilder when people realise they have an incentive to seed fake information on the internet to game AI product recommendations

I’ve already bought stuff based off of an AI suggestion, I didn’t even consider it would be so easy to influence the suggestion. Just two research papers? Mad.

ccgreg•41m ago
That's already been happening for more than a year now.
r721•20m ago
This has a name already: "AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)".
vrganj•17m ago
I hate people. Things could be so good if we weren't the way we are.
andrewstuart•1h ago
Well yes of course.

In the old days of computing people liked to say “garbage in, garbage out”.

eqvinox•36m ago
By that logic, LLMs would be essentially useless considering the amount of garbage that exists on the internet. And, honestly, for things like this they are. But they're not marketed as such, and _that_ is the problem.
tossandthrow•47m ago
Seems to be a failure of the publishing system.

For humans, or Ai, to have any knowledge, we need to have trustworthy sources.

Naturally,when you use publishing systems considered trust worthy, that is going to be trusted.

eqvinox•38m ago
A preprint isn't a published works.
fennecbutt•29m ago
This isn't an AI problem...

Clickbait headline.

krilcebre•17m ago
What stops a small, or even a large group of people to intentionally "poison" the LLMs for everyone? Seems to me that they are very fragile, and that an attack like that could cost AI companies a lot. How are they defending themselves from such attacks?
vrganj•13m ago
This is already a thing: https://www.scworld.com/brief/poison-fountain-initiative-aim...

We'll see if they succeed.

Oras•17m ago
This would work on people too, you can see daily fake info/text/videos and many people believing in them.

LLMs do not think, why this is still hard to understand? They just spit out whatever data they analyse and trained on.

I feel this kind of articles is aimed at people who hate AI and just want to be conformable within their own bias.

simmerup•13m ago
The journals the scientist submitted had a fake university, explicitly fake people, references to the simpsons and star trek, etc

Most doctors would not believe that, and would also consider any new eye disease they’d never see in real life with scepticism

malux85•15m ago
One of the frustrating parts about LLMs is that they are so neutered and conditioned to be politically correct and non-offensive, they are polite more than correct.

Its too easy to "lead the witness" if you say "could the problem be X?" It will do an unending amount of mental gymnastics to find a way that it could be X, often constructing elaborate rube Goldberg type logic rats nests so that it can say those magic words "you're absolutely right"

I would pay a lot of money for a blunt, non-politeness conditioned LLM that I would happily use with the knowledge it might occasionally say something offensive if it meant I would get the plain, cold, hard truth, instead of something watered down, placating, nanny-state robotic sycophant, creating logical spider webs desperate for acceptance, so the public doesn't get their little feelings hurt or inadequacies shown.

ungreased0675•11m ago
Claude: Dutch Mode
austin-cheney•10m ago
I bet you could easily convince LLMs of Dihydrogen-Oxide toxicity.
codeulike•3m ago
“Fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”

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