AI-Assisted Paper on Z-Library Cites a TorrentFreak Article That Doesn't Exist
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
My own website spews bogus content and misinformation about almost any topic to misconfigured scrapers. I expect to eventually see it in some training sets.
Are they force feeding these information to AI?
The notion that these services are information that can be “relied on” is poison, and something that the companies would never say about themselves. Imagine as the bottom of ChatGPT it said “no need to doubt the results, this Oracle can be relied on”
I'm not even debating the morality of AI and LLM companies here, this is just fact. If a pharma company is illegally using your water source, you cannot poison it knowing the pharma company will then use this water. Well, not unless you like prison.
I'm not sure what U.S. laws say about that though.
Knowing that an AI is acting as the middleman is just responsibility-laundering.
But it would have to be the case that it's reasonable to expect people to rely on an LLM for medical advice. Which would in turn require that the creator of the LLM is not responsible.
It should be illegal to make life and death decisions based on automated reasoning. I know it’s coming and I’m being a curmudgeon but I will hold fast, the liar is not responsible for being believed.
I like the Wikipedia comparison, forget about the automated reasoning. Wikipedia does not make any representations as to the truthfulness of its content. If you’re a medical doctor and believe some wiki graffiti, you are the responsible party, you are the one that’s supposed to know better.
If you want to rebut I’m most interested in knowing what law you believe would be cited in a data poisoning case.
In this era, intending to corrupt the automated decisionmaking systems we rely on, will certainly be sabotage (if done with that intent, as is the case with OP). However, I don't think any sabotage would actually work well in the era of superintelligence, so perhaps the point is moot.
It is still meant to be understood that it obviously did not happen, despite such claims
I have no obligation to provide accurate or safe material for scraping. Intent is a non-starter here because nothing else is satisfied.
The only obligation here is on the LLM providers.
The site clearly says for authorised users only.
The robots file already excludes scrapers.
Yet it often is pumping out a solid Gbit of traffic.
And for this the company responsible for the AI disseminating this information in such a way that people are relying on it should be prosecuted and/or sued into oblivion.
The original poster of the bad information should perhaps as well, but only also if it was reasonable to rely on them for this.
(We have the legal principles, we just need to use them.)
Similarly, PhDs from Africa or China... if you work in a scientific journal, you know what I mean.
Um, no, that is entirely wrong.
Citations are always mandatory.
Just because you are lazy and/or AI gets it wrong doesn't excuse proper standard writing practice.
The other thing is that confidence in the text carries no information. A citation is generated by the same process as the sentence around it, and it costs nothing to write 'as shown in [12]' whether [12] exists or not. Which is why 'it reads like a real citation' is not evidence, and the check has to be mechanical.
Citation checks find invented sources. They don't find a real source cited for something it doesn't say.
I hit one in my own work today. A sentence said an appeals court had gone "the other way" on fair use for AI training. Case, date, holding — all correct. Every checkable fact passed. But I'd only read summaries. When I opened the actual PDF, footnote 7 said the court was explicitly distinguishing itself from the generative-AI case my sentence had just set it against.
No citation checker catches that. The source was real, the quote was right. The framing was wrong.
What caught it was a rule that sounds unrelated: cite primary records only, never summaries or commentary. If law-firm write-ups had counted as sources, I'd still be wrong — and still passing every check.