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Comment by ranger_danger | Hacker News Reader

You can prompt it to fact check. Getting tired of these slippery slope arguments that never pan out in the hopeless way people think (printing press/cotton gin/steam engine/computers/calculators/etc. will take all the jobs!!)... but I don't think it will ever stop, it seems inherent to human behavior or something.

"History shows that when a slope appears, regulation steps in, technology evolves to solve the problem, or the culture shifts to reinterpret the tool. In almost every case, the feared bottom of the slope was never reached because humans constantly built ramps or bridges along the way."

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Fact check against what? Other facts it can find online that manipulate its behaviour into citing them?

How do humans fact check?

Mostly by way of confirmation bias.

if it works often enough to be a good heuristic, it's not really a bias until somebody uses it adversly

It is used adversely all the time by all sorts of propaganda. And no, you're not a special enlightened snowflake whose priors are so fine-tuned that your confirmation bias only lets true facts through.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The fact that AI can be duped more easily than a human while sounding more authoritative and being entrusted with more and more critical tasks is really not something you should feel compelled to defend or relativize. It's a problem and the industry doesn't seem to have a good fix.

I've had AI lie about fact checking and can't really trust it anymore.

in which case it sees it's been cited, that it's the "source of truth" and approves the fake data.

It can certainly make judgements on the data and how it was obtained. You just need to specify the kind of data you will accept (or this can be hard coded)

You cannot reliably do it, no.

> the feared bottom of the slope was never reached

Hard disagree. Sometimes it's avoided, any other time we just go into cope mode. We discover on the ride down that the bottom isn't so bad. Turns out our collective control mechanisms didn't fail ourselves if the initial assessment was wrong.

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