Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!nntp.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: sci.edu,comp.ai.philosophy,alt.books,alt.politics.media,rec.arts.books,misc.writing
Subject: Re: Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?
Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 08:04:52 -0700
Organization: A place where nothing fits quite right
Lines: 11
Message-ID: <20260518080452.00007e80@gmail.com>
References: <20260512.024503.fea93242@mixmin.net> <eb950l1ibvjm1povpc1s3q808nlro4bitq@4ax.com> <87fr3ozsgc.fsf@posteo.de>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Injection-Date: Mon, 18 May 2026 15:04:57 +0000 (UTC)
Injection-Info: dont-email.me; logging-data="2636733"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/D9GLvjxc8vUOBqvB5wrtB4PHlmH3/cgs="; posting-host="ca65118a02b4b17b8ddfeeb651995223"
Cancel-Lock: sha1:K4eqPmyGZPfGD7qli79wd/j5kLA= sha256:ZB7LHTIpq3pFiGxa/Abkvwf+akUjGgh2Fe1Jgn8cZ+Y= sha1:KEPYOukt1e+TUjyccXdCkZ32ZrU=
X-Newsreader: Claws Mail 4.3.0 (GTK 3.24.42; x86_64-w64-mingw32)
Xref: csiph.com sci.edu:259 comp.ai.philosophy:34576 alt.books:4420 alt.politics.media:78181 rec.arts.books:28901 misc.writing:23456

On Mon, 18 May 2026 10:46:11 -0400
Jonathan Lamothe <jonathan@jlamothe.net> wrote:

> I have never seen an actual definition if what AI *is*.

That's because when you say "a program that does auto-complete using a
large context window as an index to a *very* large reference dataset,
but it plays dice according to the statistical likelihood of a given
word-chain in the reference data" it starts to sound kinda silly and
unreliable.