YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Zombie stats: Where the numbers AI quotes come from

54 points mektrik 1 hour ago 18 comments

falcor84 55 minutes ago | parent

A full 40% of AI stats actually have a specific study behind them? Knowing how the human baseline is that 73.6%* of all statistics are made up on the spot, this is really encouraging.

*That particular stat was of course made up, but not by me.

alberth 48 minutes ago | parent

I know Perplexity isn't often talked about anymore but their design of every sentence needing to be able to be referenced back to an actual source (like an academic peer reviewed paper) seems like a super power for trust.

degamad 43 minutes ago | parent

How do they ensure that?

rozal 41 minutes ago | parent

No one ensures what it does but it’s proactive, it gets the people buying

Creamsicle47 39 minutes ago | parent

Agents in Paris?

marcosdumay 34 minutes ago | parent

They fine tune for that, they don't ensure anything.

(Or at least they used to, I think they changed everything recently, but I've mostly stopped using them.)

tmpz22 27 minutes ago | parent

My initial experience with Perplexity was it citing AI blog spam as a primary source so consistently I immediately dropped my subscription. (this was over a year ago, I haven't re-evaluated them since)

dubcanada 17 minutes ago | parent

Is it up to Perplexity to determine what is AI blog spam & what is correct. Versus what exists online?

jedbrooke 4 minutes ago | parent

I’ve added to my system prompt in perplexity “ignore unreliable sources” and “make sure claims are supported by multiple sources” and that seems to help.

Of course for anything of consequence I’d go and actually read the sources (but for plenty of every day stuff it’s fine). On the free plan btw

OtomotO 2 minutes ago | parent

> I’ve added to my system prompt in perplexity “ignore unreliable sources”

Ah, the good old magic trick!

jrflo 35 minutes ago | parent

Just an thinly veiled ad for something called trakkr. Not to mention that none of these "stats" actually matter aside from being the type of thing that a consultant would put in a pitch deck, at which point their accuracy doesn't matter anyways

zzzeek 35 minutes ago | parent

when people say "there should be no AI taught in schools ever. prompting? what skill is there in talking to a liar bot?" this is where they are dead wrong. Being correctly critical of LLM output is a huge skill and news flash it applies to people and human-written things too.

add-sub-mul-div 18 minutes ago | parent

Being skeptical/critical isn't a skill, it's an attitude, a state of mind. An education that requires you to find your own information and sources manually breeds that state of mind. Giving LLMs to kids (or even adults) nurtures the opposite. It's like taking them to McDonald's every day and telling them to eat healthy. Yes there's a salad on the menu, but it's rarely going to be chosen.

Of course the reality that adults do trust AI uncritically because it's the path of least resistance means the traditional education I mentioned above wasn't sufficient. But that's all the more reason not to introduce a variable that makes things worse.

mfld 33 minutes ago | parent

Never trust a statistic you haven't sneaked into the training corpus yourself.

brendong 26 minutes ago | parent

Better to be on the 40% or the 60%? Seems like both sides will bite you in the ass to an extent

toddmorey 21 minutes ago | parent

I can't decide if the report's writing ("One number, followed" & "Quoted by all five. Sourced by none.") is being lazy or ironic?

armcat 19 minutes ago | parent

There is a human/user element here as well - will the users check the citations, if they are provided inline? I recall in the early ChatGPT web search and Perplexity days, most of the citations didn't work (made up, or 404). You get a false sense of security by having a "[1]" next to the stat or a claim. Maybe labs companies should have some additional quality ranking/checks on these, if it's in their interest of course.

ieie3366 17 minutes ago | parent

Ah yes. The AI slop blogpost calling out AI slop statistics. We must go deeper