Welcome to the era where your smartest-seeming friend is also the one most likely to confidently pass onto you a made-up fact. Tech labs have been trying for years to teach AIs not to hallucinate. That is, to stop inventing stuff that sounds plausible but is flat-out wrong. And yes, there’s been progress. Models make fewer obvious outright “untruths” than they used to. But here’s the blunt truth nobody wants to wallpaper over with optimistic press releases: there’s no known way to make them perfectly truthful.
Why? Because these systems don’t “know” things the way we do. They aren’t pulling facts from a single bookshelf and reciting them. When you type a question, the model is doing a math problem. They are choosing the sequence of words that’s statistically most likely given everything it’s seen. That probabilistic process is brilliant and uncanny and, on its worst days, inventively wrong. It’s like asking a very clever raconteur who has read everything but never checked the index. Charming, persuasive, and occasionally fabricated.
So we live in a meta-world now. We ask a machine for answers, and then we have to ask the machine’s answers whether they’re true. We become our own fact-checkers. We trust less; we verify more. We’ve come to live out the trust but verify mantra. Everything becomes second-guessing wrapped in the voice of authority. Which is exhausting, frankly but also oddly empowering.
This is the part where pop culture becomes less funny and more prophetic. The more meta we get by questioning the answer to a question about whether the answer is right, the more it feels like we are living inside a dystopian show.
Severance vibes: which side of the curtain are we on? The Matrix vibes: are we unplugging or just getting better at decorating a simulated reality? Are we waking up, or sinking deeper into a very polished hallucination?
Maybe the answer is both. Maybe we’re increasingly lucid about the fragility of information, even while the tools make it easier to feel informed. Awareness is the new armor: skeptical, curious, and slightly annoyed. That’s a decent human posture. It’s messy and a little mournful. Yes, we wanted a magic oracle but it’s also responsible.
So keep talking to the machines. Use them. Love their speed, their fluency, their uncanny metaphors. But treat their pronouncements the way you’d treat any charismatic stranger at a party who is flattering and interesting but worth fact-checking before you invite them to babysit your next big decision.
The lesson of our times is not to unplug the future. It’s to train better habits of care. Verify. Cite. Be suspicious in a curious way. And maybe, every once in a while, read a real book and savor the fact that no machine has yet learned how to truly smell its pages.
Categories: Culture, current events, mental health, Pop Culture, Psychology, social media, society, TV
psychologistmimi 
SMiLes Dear Miriam At 5 Years Old So Curious
Full of Wonder and Awe All About Life Wishing
Wishing For
A Machine
That Would
Answer All
my Curiosities
About Life by Just
Pushing A Button as Such
Yes Fast Forward 60 Years and
Voila iPhone15 ProMax Combines
And Intertwines Chat GPT With Siri
to Give IT its Best Shot to Answer
All the Curiosities i Have Yes Even
Flashing ‘Psychedelic Colors’ Around
The Sides of the Phone Indeed Indicating
A “Brave
New World”
Today of Man
And Or Machine
And as i Learned long ago
Don’t Do too Much Mechanical Cognition
Activities Lest We Fall as a Statue to the Bottom of the
Ocean Like the
Little ‘AI Boy’
Who Wishes
He Could BE A Real
Boy Just Waiting for
A Statue of His Mother to
come to Life
i am Real Now
i am Not Going
Down to the
Bottom of the
Frozen Ocean Again
Ah Yes Now the Whole lIving
Ocean Mind to Give AWay Soul Free
With
SMiLes…
Indeed not
Being a Dead
Machine is a Grand
Gift So Instead i Slave
AI at my Every Command
And Check the Results as
They are
often
All
F’
Ed up
Yet if i Just
Wanna know How
Far it is to the
Moon or the Sun
(Or the New
Neighborhood
Walmart Market)
It never Fails
It Never Fails
to Use a Ruler at Least hehe…
Yet the Truth is the Masses of Average
Studied Human Attention Span of Less
Than A Gold Fish Yes Less that 3 Seconds
Likely for the most part
Are not Gonna Get Around
to Fact Checking AI Not Unlike
All the other ‘Stuff’ that Ignorance
Draws Down to the Bottom of the Ocean
Frozen too
So Now
We Have
“Animal
Farm” too Hmm..:)
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At 5 years, such a wish must have been wondrous. Keep on being you!
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I automatically turn off the ‘AS’ (guess what the S stands for) by typing -AI in the search box after the search request.
I hate the constant intrusion – and automatically scroll past anything produced that way.
Why? Because the checking is exhausting, and EVERY single little detail must be checked.
I go to the primary websites – find my information there (and still consider whether it is correct).
Maybe it’s the only way to manage the sheer amount of ‘information’ out there, especially when there are so many fake journals ‘publishing’ garbage that is NOT peer reviewed (not that peer review is great).
The problem is that the misinformation is drowning the information.
Fortunately I am no longer doing hard science: I write fiction in my ‘retirement’. And that comes out of me, my understanding of the world, the things I care about.
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Completely agree that the misinformation is drowning out the information. Such a sad state of being. Keep being you and putting your knowledge out there in its varied ways.
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