# Citation glitch being perpetually reiterated by AI **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [April 16, 2025, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111 "2025-04-16T17:45:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/81 "2025-04-17T18:23:06Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > You simply ask it. When will people realize you can ask LLMs for citations? Because most of them will just make them up out of mashes from their language base. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/82 "2025-04-17T18:25:30Z")
> [@xtenkfarpl](#): > > Because most of them will just make them up out of mashes from their language base. Says you, who tried LLMs once years ago, to a guy who uses modern ones every day? ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/83 "2025-04-17T18:29:12Z")
> [@Jay\_Z](#): > > Human babies are also motivated to create a social relationship with the people they are having a conversation with. LLMs have no such motivation. There is a reinforcement process in the training that is the equivalent of motivation. Sure there’s no social motive as such but LLMs are definitely trying to fit in, within a rather narrow slice of human activity. ---
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/84 "2025-04-17T18:29:44Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > Says you, who tried LLMs once years ago, to a guy who uses modern ones every day? You sound like a True Believer. You are welcome to your faith. I will try a few experiments on current systems. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/85 "2025-04-17T18:31:56Z")
> [@xtenkfarpl](#): > > You sound like a True Believer. No, just pointing out that you are attempting to AIsplain to someone with vastly more and more current knowledge of the state of LLMs than you have. ---
**Author:** ![Jay\_Z](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Jay\_Z](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jay_Z)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/86 "2025-04-17T18:40:19Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > There is a reinforcement process in the training that is the equivalent of motivation. Sure there’s no social motive as such but LLMs are definitely trying to fit in, within a rather narrow slice of human activity How does that work when the LLMs are the single source of truth for the world? ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/87 "2025-04-17T18:41:26Z")
I don’t understand your question. Who said they were? ---
**Author:** ![Jay\_Z](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Jay\_Z](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jay_Z)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/88 "2025-04-17T18:45:22Z")
AI is going to be writing all of the sources it’s going to be referencing. It’s good to have different minds, different people that come together and create competing ideas from their individual units of humanity. I’m very suspicious of a one stop shop for knowledge. AI and LLMs are going to be winner take all. It’s the nature of society. ---
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/89 "2025-04-17T18:49:17Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#): > > No, just pointing out that you are attempting to AIsplain to someone with vastly more and more current knowledge of the state of LLMs than you have. I am not going to respond to this further, but you are close to attacking the poster and threadshitting. As I have said, I will try some more experiments. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/90 "2025-04-17T18:49:20Z")
Oh, I see what you mean. It could destroy the usefulness of the Internet completely, I think. ---
**Author:** ![Heracles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heracles/32/487_2.png) [@Heracles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heracles)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/91 "2025-04-17T20:01:00Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > No, because a search engine isn’t a source for answers. It points you toward things that are sources for answers, and then you can evaluate those sources. Well, actually, for a time, Google was a filter for truth and quality. That’s what made Google different from the first generation of search engines, such as Yahoo Search and Altavista: it tracked user behaviour (which site among the results a majority of users chose to open) and fed that back into its results, so that the “good” sites floated naturally to the top of results. Web 2.0 and all that. Then they monetised ranking more and more, and greed (by page publishers and by Google themselves) became a big factor, which is why Google results from the past few years have been another form of bullshit, ironically making ChatGPT and its cousins seem all the more miraculous. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 8:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/92 "2025-04-17T20:06:33Z")
I’m sure you can give examples of where the reliable, reputable hit is now buried under greedy garbage. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/93 "2025-04-17T20:15:25Z")
> [@dolphinboy](#): > > How can a completely made up lie ever be the most likely continuation? I can see it coming up with a wrong answer, but coming up with bullshit alludes me. 100% of your existence is living inside a statistical model that lies to you constantly. When you “see” a thing, what’s happening? If there’s a tree in front of you, you don’t directly perceive a tree. Instead, some light that bounced off the tree reaches your eyes and your brain has to make sense of it. There are an infinite number of things that your sensory input _could_ be. Maybe it’s a picture of a tree. Maybe it’s a sculpture shaped like a tree. Maybe it’s a sculpture that isn’t shaped like a tree, but from the particular angle you’re at, lines up to look like one. Maybe it’s a tree but it’s much closer or farther away than you realize. Maybe you have a VR headset on that’s displaying a tree. And so on. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the time your brain correctly decides that you saw a tree and triggers the thoughts and memories associated with them. Because of course most of the time it is in fact a tree. Your brain’s statistical model worked. But sometimes it doesn’t. Why does this picture look like it’s wavy and moving?: [![](https://qbi.uq.edu.au/files/46718/optical_illusion_brain.jpg) ](https://qbi.uq.edu.au/files/46718/optical_illusion_brain.jpg) Your brain is lying to you. Something about this picture is triggering the circuitry that was trained to detect movement in natural scenes, and it’s misfiring here. It works even though you know it’s misfiring, but you can’t help it. Illusions are inherent to intelligence. They inevitably arise because we try to perceive a world that’s infinite in complexity with a sensory/processing device that is limited (and it has to be limited since it’s inside the world that it has to perceive). That necessarily means making guesses that will turn out to be wrong. Humans do have a neocortex that does allow us _some_ degree of self-correction, so that we are not perfectly bound to the base statistics that underlie our sensory processing and subconscious. You can decide that the image above isn’t actually moving even if it still looks like it. LLMs and other AI models will probably need something like this eventually (and do, to a degree, with reasoning models) that can look back at the results and see if they make sense. But they’ll still be imperfect, just as humans come to imperfect conclusions all the time, even in the presence of conflicting evidence. No way around it. ---
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/94 "2025-04-17T20:16:23Z")
> [@Heracles](#): > > That’s what made Google different from the first generation of search engines, such as Yahoo Search and Altavista: it tracked user behaviour (which site among the results a majority of users chose to open) and fed that back into its results, so that the “good” sites floated naturally to the top of results. Web 2.0 and all that. Did they really track user behavior? I thought their original ‘secret sauce’ was that they checked how often a page was referenced by other pages by looking at the hyperlinks? ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/95 "2025-04-17T20:23:37Z")
> [@xtenkfarpl](#): > > I thought their original ‘secret sauce’ was that they checked how often a page was referenced by other pages by looking at the hyperlinks? Yeah, that is approximately how their PageRank algorithm worked. Anyway, all this stuff is decades out of date because the “search engine optimization” types quickly figured out how to game the system. So it’s been an arms race the whole time. There’s undoubtedly some conflict in Google whether to put the best results up or the results that make them the most money, but they aren’t going out of their way to promote the trash that often rises to the top (since that doesn’t accomplish either goal). That’s just because they’re losing the arms race. I’m sure they’re hoping AI can help them here. ---
**Author:** ![Heracles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/heracles/32/487_2.png) [@Heracles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Heracles)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/96 "2025-04-17T20:36:20Z")
> [@xtenkfarpl](#): > > Did they really track user behavior? > I thought their original ‘secret sauce’ was that they checked how often a page was referenced by other pages by looking at the hyperlinks? Oops, you’re right. The links are the key factor. I guess my (fallible) memory is also a bullshit generator at times. And I can’t tell at _which_ times. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/97 "2025-04-17T20:39:33Z")
> [@Jay\_Z](#): > > It’s good to have different minds, different people that come together and create competing ideas from their individual units of humanity. I’m very suspicious of a one stop shop for knowledge. AI and LLMs are going to be winner take all. It’s the nature of society. Wait until androids that can pass for human are a reality, and town hall meetings and rallies are packed with AI “supporters”. ---
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/98 "2025-04-17T20:46:49Z")
> [@Heracles](#): > > Oops, you’re right. The links are the key factor. I guess my (fallible) memory is also a bullshit generator at times. And I can’t tell at _which_ times. No worries. I do try to be sure that anything I say from memory is verifiable by objective third party information. But my wife, for example, often ‘remembers’ things that never happened, and I sometimes have to go to some lengths to prove this to her… ☹ ---
**Author:** ![xtenkfarpl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c2a13f/32.png) [@xtenkfarpl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xtenkfarpl)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2025, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/99 "2025-04-17T20:51:33Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > Wait until androids that can pass for human are a reality, and town hall meetings and rallies are packed with AI “supporters”. Indeed. Was Steven Byerley _really_ a robot? ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2025, 10:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/100 "2025-04-18T10:37:46Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > > [@wolfpup](#): > > > > Maybe the skeptics here might want to comment on the performance of this alleged “bullshit generator” and point out the bullshit parts! > > Bullshit is not necessarily false. Bullshit is what you get when the speaker isn’t particularly concerned about truth. All of what GPT says is bullshit. Most of it is true, but it’s still bullshit. That seems to me just a restatement of the tired old saw that GPT doesn’t “really understand” anything. But the question of what constitutes “real understanding” is a subjective continuum that is ultimately just a meaningless semantic rabbit-hole. As I said earlier (and I thought you had agreed), the question of whether or not any advanced AI truly possesses “real understanding” can only be defined functionally and becomes semantically meaningless with very advanced systems that have developed emergent properties. For example, I’m sure you’re familiar with the 1960s era AI demonstration program developed by Joseph Wiezenbaum called “Eliza”. Eliza was disguised as a non-directive psychotherapist, meaning that it never had to offer any real information but just encourage the user to participate. Thus when you said {whatever}, Eliza might respond with something like “why do you think {whatever}?” or just a bland “how does that make you feel?”. The point here being that these were just preprogrammed rote responses that had no relevance whatsoever to anything the user was saying. Eliza clearly did not “understand” anything at all. But when I ask GPT a fairly long question (as in my example in **[post #69](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111/69))** and the AI responds with a comprehensive answer that is directly relevant to what I asked, then the question of “understanding” has certainly moved into an entirely new realm, in even the most cynical interpretation. Likewise with the ability of advanced LLMs to do effective language translation. The subtle linguistic and cultural nuances of idiomatic expressions have always been the bane of computerized translation, yet in my limited testing GPT has done such translations flawlessly. I can even ask it “what does this idiom really mean?” and it will tell me. So where’s the “bullshit”? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/citation-glitch-being-perpetually-reiterated-by-ai/1017111.md?page=6)