May 26, 2025 11:57:18 Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com>: No, Wikipedia has (at least historically) human editors who supposedly have some knowledge of reality and history. An LLM response is going to be a series of tokens predicted based on probabilities from its training data. The output may correspond to a ground truth in the real world, but only because it was trained on data which contained that ground truth. Assuming the sources it cites are real works, it seems fine as a search engine, but the text that it outputs should absolutely not be thought of as something arrived at by similar means as text produced by supposedly knowledgeable and well-intentioned humans.

TUHS->COFF Before LLMs, Wikipedia, World Wide Web, ... adages such as "Trust, but verify," and "Inspect what you expect," were appropriate, and still are. Dabbling in editing and creating Wikipedia articles has enforced those notions. A few anecdotes here -- I could cite others. 1. I think my first experience was trying in 2008 to fix what is now at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_Gas_Company_(1967%E2%80%931970), because the article had so much erroneous content, and because I had worked/performed at that venue 1969-70. Much of what I did in 2008 was accepted without anyone else verifying. But others broke things/changed things, even renamed the original article and replaced it with an article about a newer club that adopted the name. A few years ago, I tried to make corrections, citing poster images at https://concerts.fandom.com/wiki/Vulcan_Gas_Company. Those changes were vetoed because fandom.com was considered unreliable. I copied the images from fandom to https://technologists.com/VGC/, and then citing those images was then accepted by the editors involved. (The article has been changed dramatically, still is seriously deficient, IMO, but I'm not interested in fixing.) 2. Last year, I created https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hub_City_Movers, citing sources I considered reliable. Citations to images at discogs.com were vetoed as unreliable, based on analogous bias against that site. Partly to see what was possible, I engaged with editors, found citations they found acceptable, and ultimately produced a better article. 3. Later last year, I edited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX to fix obviously erroneous discussion of AIX 1/2/3. Even though I used my own writings as references, the changes were accepted. I still use the Web, Wikipedia, and even LLMs, but cautiously. Charlie -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/mas.to: CharlesHSauer

Jason Bowen via TUHS <tuhs(a)tuhs.org> writes: LLMs are known to hallucinate sources. Here's a database of "legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content": https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/ Here's a research paper about LLMs hallucinating software packages: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10279 Not to mention about LLMs hallucinating 'facts' about people: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-21/norwegian-man-files-complaint-chatgp… As a result of what they're trained on, chatbots can be "confidently wrong": -- https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/we-compared-eight-ai-search-engines-theyre-a… and can contradict themselves: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/34/04/#subj2.1 Coming back to LLMs in the context of software: -- https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/03/19/ai-coding-tools-fix-bugs-by-adding-bugs/ A research paper found that: -- https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03622 As someone who has spent a lot of time and energy working on wikis, i would say that a big difference between LLMs and wikis is that one can directly fix misinformation on wikis in a way that one can't do with LLMs. And wikis typically provide public access to the trail of what changes were made to the information, when, and by whom (or at least from what IP address), unlike the information provided by LLMs. The LLM cat is well and truly out of the bag. But the combination of LLMs hallucinating information, together with the human tendency to correlate the confident conveyance of information with veracity of that information, means that people should be encouraged to take LLM output with a cellar of salt, and to check the output against other sources. Alexis.

On 27/5/25 13:08, George Michaelson wrote: Yes please. We've strayed away from Unix and its history. Feel free to move the AI/LLM conversation over to the COFF list. Thanks, Warren

On Tue, May 27, 2025 at 2:44 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: Regarding Mark V. Shaney, I once heard a story that someone was so upset about some of its posts on USENET that they drove to Bell Labs to confront it, not realizing "he" was in fact a program, and not a person. On arriving at the labs, someone explained what was what, they went home, and that was the end of it. But, in the version I heard, they drove from, like, Ohio...or somewhere in the midwest. I find this very difficult to believe: surely by the time they got to Harrisburg, perhaps, they'd have cooled down enough to realize they were making poor life choices and should turn around and go back home. Is there any truth to this, or is the story (as I suspect) just apocryphal? - Dan C.