Company Offering '100% Human-Written, Never AI' Medical Research Is 100% AI
404media.co
404media.co
If there's no entity named, or you can't verify that a named entity actually exists, it's a red flag.
In this case, there's no individual or company named anywhere that I can see. Not on the About page, and not in any of the legal agreements. And the phone number looks like it's a VoIP number from Onvoy, a major wholesaler, which is a yellow flag.
I mean, that's a red red flag.
SME you expect to find a phone number, larger companies and especially B2C you expect these days to not find one at all. For very large ones, you expect to find a lot of phone numbers.
1. Most of the negativity about AI seems to relate to the economic effects, not the technology itself.
2. From what I've seen, the average person is still unable to identify AI created content, websites, etc. The website this post is about is clearly vibe coded (looks like everything including the copy is from Claude) but I'd guess that only a small fraction of the people who see it will recognize that.
In the UK we are in droughts, and we are being told to restrict our water usage. Somehow if you run a data centre then the rules don't apply.
If the water company is telling me to restrict how much I wash my clothes then corps need to feel some of the pressure too.
For the work, I don’t think it’s just “costing the job” fear. It’s so many more things. Someone everyone is even more overworked, the amount of babysitting they require which everyone just seem to not talk that much about. Design docs and code that are increasingly weirder to read, sometimes make sense and other time look like they make sense but not really, the docslop, commit messages slop, I can go on.
It’s mix of people issue where it’s race to bottom to increase utilization, which leads to less than ideal experience. Technology is great but it’s definitely getting more trust than it should when we accept the output. I think everyone would be much happier, and technology would have much better reputation if everyone just slows the f down and uses it bit more reasonably. What is reasonable, you figure that out by slowing down and actually thinking about the problem you are trying to solve … not just prompt your way out for everything.
> Design docs and code that are increasingly weirder to read, sometimes make sense and other time look like they make sense but not really, the docslop, commit messages slop, I can go on.
The "average person" I'm referring to is not an engineer/developer. It's an office worker, grandmother, HVAC technician, etc. Non-techies who use the internet for entertainment and information.
From where I sit, most of them can't tell an AI-generated image from a real one (when the latest models are used), don't read something and think "it looks like Claude wrote this", etc.
AI is in growth phase, and as more people use it more they will be able to tell particularly as they interact first hand with it.
Going back to your original point, people don't hate "slop" because they think it will cost their job (maybe some people). People hate slop, because they are forced to read it most of the day and if you want to do your job well closely babysit, verify and rearrange. The overall expectation of quality has declined over quantity.
I'm not saying its not productivity booster. But the way its used to increase quantity and then map it to productivity. This results in to two things (1) more work for people so worse WLB (2) increased dissatisfaction with work because the quantity is high and maybe you can call it X% productivity boost, but maybe with X/2% productivity boost you may get Y% quality boost, wlb and satisfaction with your work.
Have you ever looked at the content and interactions on social platforms like Facebook? I hate to be that guy, but it's not only that the average person is just not that smart, it's that the average person doesn't care.
If the AI content tells them what they want to hear or seems informative or entertaining, they'll eat it up.
It's the same reason some of the most obvious scams continue to fool millions upon millions of people.
Into which of those categories do we place "company guts its support-system into uselessness by firing all the people and putting in 'AI' which mainly runs customers in circles"?
Is it an economic effect because the company was enticed into it by the promise of cost-cutting, or is it a technology issue because the "AI" system can't handle exceptional situations? Perhaps it's a third thing, where "AI" is an excuse for one side to violate a social/legal norm.
Now, the opposite is true - AI has gotten so good, people are trying to pass AI work off as “100% human-powered.”
To me this remarkable inversion in a short period of time demonstrates how powerful these models can be; even if AI is overhyped and the financing/economics seem like a stack of cards, this example is driving home the point to me of just how far these models have come.
I'd put it differently. Yes AI is better than it used to be but it's still the lazy choice; human-powered is better but more expensive.
I’m not sure the company in this article qualifies—it seemed immediately obvious that it wasn’t real.
I don’t believe that’s an unsolvable problem.
I’ve done some private experiments where I had Claude, over many sessions, design and implement original research projects in fields in the humanities and social sciences, with a research paper as the final product of each project.
I included detailed instructions on research ethics in CLAUDE.md and other project documentation, insisting, among other things, that it double- and triple-check all citations and references to make sure not only that the referenced papers existed but also that they actually said what the paper Claude wrote claimed they said. I gave Claude an OpenRouter API key and a daily budget, and it outsourced much of that adversarial checking to models made by other companies. In my checks of its final papers, I found no instances of hallucinated or otherwise invalid references. At various steps in the research process, Claude also, on its own initiative, had other models critique its research designs, data analyses, written drafts, etc., and it made changes based on that feedback.
The final papers were, to my eye, well done, if quite narrow in their scope and claims. The ethical alignment I imposed on it, as well as its lack of ego, seemed to keep it from making even weak claims if they could not be rigorously justified.
I’m a retired academic, and I no longer have any need or desire to produce research papers myself, with or without AI. Rather, I am interested in the impact of AI tools on the research process, particularly on how research and researchers will be evaluated in the years ahead.
I did not, and will not, release any of those papers written for me by Claude, though I have released what it produced for another research project I had it do, on a topic in the philosophy of language. In case anyone is interested:
So your solution to get it to not hallucinate was to ask it not to hallucinate? And you suppose that this was a novel approach? What, that people just hadn’t tried that before?
I certainly don’t claim that this technique was original. There have been many reports of people using similar methods:
“CiteAudit: You Cited It, But Did You Read It? A Benchmark for Verifying Scientific References in the LLM Era”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23452v3
“CiteLLM: An Agentic Platform for Trustworthy Scientific Reference Discovery”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23075v1
“Source or It Didn’t Happen: A Multi-Agent Framework for Citation Hallucination Detection”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08583v1
I also don’t claim that such techniques are 100% effective. While the chance of different LLMs producing the same hallucinated reference is extremely small, they still rely on bibliographic information found on the web being accurate. But a human checking a paper’s references for accuracy is likely to rely on the same sources.
Buying stuff from truly anonymous provider isn't possible. From a legal standpoint you basically transfer money to them for fun. Since, you know, can't enter any agreement with unknown entity.
However for anything consumer protection related, they must not be only transparent, but I'd argue, clearly obvious who is behind the service.
In the context of the previous comment there was an implied equivalence between individual and corporation rights to privacy.
Large corporations already get lenient passes for breaking the laws and regulations. Let us not propagate ideas that champion for even more things that benefit corporations.
There is no misconception. I would suggest the inverse, that it seems deliberate to try to draw a line between the two and suggest that it makes any sense to have one without the other.
Which means we have a big problem.