I won a championship that doesn't exist

Back in September 2024 I named a whale "Teresa T" with just a blog entry and a YouTube video caption: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/8/teresa-t-whale-pillar-p...

(For a few glorious weeks if you asked any search-enabled LLM, including Google search previews, for the name of the whale in the Half Moon Bay harbor it confidently replied Teresa T)

So this means that for bad actors it's more efficient to manufacture brand new fake stories instead of trying to distort the real ones. Don't produce fake articles absolving yourself of a crime, instead produce fake articles accusing your opponent of 100 different things. Then people will fact-check the accusations using LLMs, and since all the sources mentioning those accusations are controlled by you, the LLMs will confirm them.

This is sort of why "brand" matters; it provides a source of trust.

Encyclopedia Britannica used to be that source of 'facts'. Then it became whatever page-rank told you. Eventually SEO optimization ruined that.

News stories are the same thing. For certain groups, they have their 'independent' publication whose reporting they trust.

People think that whatever information an "AI" spits out has gone through a round of critical thinking which enhances the trust value of that information.

The early LLM's using groomed data may have had such critical thinking somewhere in the pipeline. So it was already not really trustworthy.

And now? Using agents to search the internet for you?...

Garbage in, garbage out still applies in computing as ever.

Even being on stoner.com,I read that as meaning something different from what was meant.

Op has a great surname!

Asking Opus 4.7 who the reigning 6nimmt! champion is leads to this article and a warning about a possible hoax

Doesn't help that AI media literacy is so primitive compared to how intelligent the models are generally. We're in a marginally better place than we were back when chatbots didn't cite anything at all, but duplicated Wikipedia citations back to a single source about a supposedly global event is just embarrassing. By default, I feel citations and epistemological qualifications should be explicit, front-and-center, and subject to introspection, not implicit and confined to tiny little opaque buttons as an afterthought.

I've wanted to come up with my own for a while ...

"AI told me that..."

In the old days, it would have been "I read on Google..."

We can easily look ahead a few years and see how people will rely on the LLMs to be a source of truth in the same way people looked at Google that way, or newspapers.

Rewriting history has been happening for a while, and with LLMs being the one-stop shop for guidance and truth, the rewrite will be complete.

Doubly so since most people see these things as artificial intelligence, and soon to be superintelligence...so how can they be wrong?

I am paranoid that this is happening every time I ask a LLM for a product recommendation or a shop recommendation. In the same way as SEO, anyone wanting to sell or convince needs to do as much as they can to influence the LLM.

It's almost like he was a better Chuck Norris than Chuck Norris. By his own ... testimony ...