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In this case I asked ChatGPT without the part specifying mode 7 and it replied with a working program using mode 7, with a comment at the top that mode 7 would be the best choice.


I always thought this was something I got from watching The Brave Little Toaster and similar content when I was tiny.


Fun fact: The Brave Little Toaster is based on a story by Thomas M. Disch, who is a pretty interesting sci-fi writer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_M._Disch


Better than Toy Story, but Toy Story is much better known and does the same thing


Yeah..except that The Brave Little Toaster has a specific anti consumerism slant..

I can't imagine why the toy based story that was designed from the get-go to shovel plastic into kids via emotional hooks took off better and was better supported by the industry...


I can't take this kind of pressure

I must confess one more dusty road

Would be just a road too long

Worthless

IYKYK. A few touches:

- "I just can't / I just can't / I just can't seem to get started" mimics a car trying to turn over

- Pairing the wedding and the funeral


Why would you write a report and ask an LLM to make up citations once done?


Anthropic had a slip-up like this recently with a legal filing (totally unrelated to the report, just a similar example of bad citations). After being challenged by a judge, they said:

> A Latham & Watkins associate located that article as potential additional support for Ms. Chen’s testimony using a Google search. The article exists [...]

> [...] I asked Claude.ai to provide a properly formatted legal citation for that source using the link to the correct article. Unfortunately, although providing the correct publication title, publication year, and link to the provided source, the returned citation included an inaccurate title and incorrect authors.

Anthropic could be lying, but apparently the link is indeed correct, so the account seems plausible.

However, the current situation is less understandable. The article says that "some correctly cited papers were inaccurately summarized", which suggests that AI either was used for the report itself, or at least was told to add citations without the author's input, which would be far more irresponsible than what Anthropic did. The apparently completely hallucinated "paper on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs" also doesn't look good.

The article also mentions that "[a]n early copy of the report shared with reporters did not include citations", which does support the theory that citations were added after the fact (whether or not AI was also used for the report itself).

Source for Anthropic testimony: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...


I'm not saying they didn't. It's just that the title here says "WH releases health report written by LLM" but the article it links to does not claim that. The headline from the article is about the fake citations.

Also, I could imagine that the report, whether drafted by human or not, could have been pasted into an LLM with a prompt like "make this sound more authoritative" and the LLM dutifully added some "citations" because, what's more authoritative looking than citations?


Wasn’t that more the point of the person you replied with counterexamples to?


Let’s assume good faith all round. One poster rightly highlights the overwhelmingly positive track record. Another points out the negatives went a little beyond an “oopsie”.


Yeah just being respectful to those 14 astronauts who died. They are worth mentioning. Nasa had major setbacks - not an "oopsie". Didn't mean to hijack the thread. Well done Voyager team.


I think this is an unfair characterization of the comment. Nobody is dismissing the shuttle crews. The “oopsie” was in reference to the Mars Climate Orbiter mishap that did not involve loss of human life.


Reddit style drive by snark doesn’t work as well here imho.


> Reddit style drive by snark doesn’t work as well here imho.

Isn't this the only snark and drive-by comment around? I think it's more interesting, just as I think a pit stop change is more interesting in F1 than most of the race itself.


I’ve just completely lost the ability to tell the difference between satire/parody and reality.


I’m a musician (American, but live in Europe now) and the Wikipedia version is the only definition I’ve ever heard.


It was so much fun though to get it to explain why terrible things were great, if you just made it sound like you liked the thing you were asking about.


“As much as” are weasel words to help them sell their AI coding products to others.


Wouldn’t hiding it also be political? Seems being transparent is closer to behaving neutrally to me.


Neutral behavior is not desired. The admin desires to take unilateral, unchecked action without repercussions, while controlling the narrative. Enact tariffs while publicly stating "everything is fine."

"Why are you making us look bad by sharing the facts of the actions we're taking?" is how you can think of this. Never assume rational and good faith behavior from bad faith actors. Watch what someone does, not what they say. The words are free and meaningless.


100% you’re either a militant conformist or an enemy.


Amazon has now backed down and will hide them, so it seems the strategy works.


Well, in the literal sense it would be neutral to be transparent, but "political" in the sense that the White House is using means "you're being mean to me."


It’s such bare hypocrisy, but it’s just another reminder that they have no actual beliefs aside from power, so everything they do or say is fair game.


That's what I would think. Though, as other users have pointed out, Amazon is being selective about what what they show. If they really wanted to be transparent and neutral, they'd need to show everything that makes up the price (how much the seller/manufacturer gets paid, what Amazon's cut is, how much goes to the payment processor, etc.)

Personally, I think it would be pretty great if they showed all that, but I don't see that ever happening.


Isn't this different? This tariff isn't a seller's cut, it's a tax, and when I look at my Amazon invoice I see the taxes I paid.


Yeah, I agree it's different, but it's all selective transparency. They're willing to be transparent about things they can directly blame on the government (tax, tariffs) but not other things that influence the price (Amazon's markup, the payment processing charges).

It would be better if they showed all of that, IMO.


No, that's not the same thing. Tariffs are taxes collected by customs agents (no matter how much this administration wants to pretend they aren't), and taxes already show up as itemized additions to your receipt, unlike margins and seller fees.


To me that just means they're already doing selective transparency. They treat government influences on price as different than other factors that influence the price.


Every receipt I’ve ever gotten in my life has separated tax, and I don’t recall I’ve ever seen seller margins or anything like that on a receipt before.


Yeah, I'm not saying Amazon is the only one doing this. But I am saying that if they're saying that consumers deserve transparency, this just scratches the surface.


There is no neutrality.

No, seriously: "political neutrality" as a concept is inherently and fatally flawed.

The closest you can ever attempt to come is either

a) maintain/support the current status quo—this is obviously a big problem for anyone the status quo is not serving

b) tailor whatever you're saying/doing to try to cleave to the exact current center of the political landscape—this is obviously going to be very fraught and highly subjective; no one actually does this

Anyone who says they're "apolitical" or who tells you to make something "politically neutral" is nearly guaranteed to be just a beneficiary of the status quo advocating for preserving it, often without even realizing that's what they're doing.

Ultimately, it's much more honest and positive in the long run to be honest about your own biases and, yes, be as transparent as possible.


This is false. Or at least it's almost totally false.

I can try to judge things by whether they are true or false, accurate or misleading, good or bad ideas, regardless of who said them.

Yeah, I fail sometimes - partly because I do have biases, and partly because I don't have infinite amounts of time and energy to dig in to find out the truth. Still, I don't judge what the administration says by which brand of administration it is. I prefer my news sources to be straight rather than slanted.

And I can say that without being a supporter of the current status quo. I find Trump's bullying to be reprehensible.


interesting, out of curiosity did this lead you to not see his bullying and behaviors coming?

did this lead you to deny yourself the bigger picture of past behaviors, context, etc…?


What have I said that made you think that I ever supported Trump? I didn't, ever.

What made you think that I was blind to what he was? I could tell what he was before he was elected the first time.


"I can employ reading comprehension and bullshit detection skills on any text" is not the same as saying "any text is neutral", nor even "it is possible for a text to be neutral".

My statement says nothing about the ability of any particular reader to use their learned skills of discerning fact from falsehood to judge what is true. It says that even if you (for any value of "you", including me!) think what you are writing is "neutral", that is, at best, and with 99.9% certainty, because it conforms to the current status quo and/or your unconscious assumptions and biases.


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