The Curious Case of Quentell

I wouldn&#x27;t be so quick to attribute the embellished biographies to AI. That&#x27;s certainly a possibility, but it&#x27;s also just as possible that these are humans going off of verbal&#x2F;oral histories that morphed in the ongoing game of Telephone. Plenty of humans get things mixed up, after all.<p>Still, it&#x27;s worth being vigilant about this sort of thing, AI or no - and LLMs are certainly increasing in the quality and quantity of bullshit they can produce. People give Wikipedia a lot of flack for being &quot;editable by everyone&quot;, but the emphasis on providing actual citations for claims is an important one - to the point that I&#x27;ll readily trust an &quot;amateur&quot;&#x2F;&quot;hobbyist&quot; work that cites its sources over a &quot;professional&quot; work that doesn&#x27;t.

I&#x27;m not very anti-LLM&#x2F;AI, but this is one of the scarier parts, to me at least.<p>Data that is obscure, not easily fact-checked, and (outside of a handful of people) there&#x27;s no motivation to fact check it.<p>Incorrect data will sit there, mostly viewed by other bots, incorporated into the next model. The issue is just going to snowball.<p>Good luck to any future historians that want to look back at this time period.

The Law of Unintended Consequences is unavoidable; as so often I read this post, and said, &quot;Yes, that&#x27;s just what would happen. Oh, dear.&quot;

A lovely field trip to the morgue of Dead Internet theory!<p>&quot;Nothing is real; everything is permitted.&quot;