this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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I can understand why this technology would be particularly addicting to hank.
His whole persona is answering questions like "what color flower do bees like the most" with the kind of enthusiasm that shows his curiosity and deep passion for science. So a machine where you can put in those sorts of questions and get an almost instant answer would be very addicting.
Only they're not "answers". AI does not provide information, it tells you what you want to hear. It even makes up fake scientific papers as "references". So you think your info is backed up by peer reviewed sources. Nope!
Oh they'll give "answers" alright. They could just be wrong or untethered from reality.
One of my favorite economics bloggers for decades started sourcing his information with LLMs. He was such a bright guy. 😭
The better models absolutely will cite real scientific papers that are relevant to your discussion. It doesn't hallucinate as a matter of course, it can hallucinate some of the time. You can't trust what it gives you 100%, you have to verify it. But it very often gives useful answers and information.
That’s just not true.
They do far better today than they did three years ago, but they still get stuff wrong constantly. I've had it give me the source for claims, and the source says the exact opposite of what it claimed. This isn't a quantized to hell model running on my own hardware, but Opus from Claude.
My go to is to get people to ask it something they know a lot about, and see how bad inaccurate it is. If it gets something you know about so wrong, how wrong is it for everything else?
ok, but they will give you a different answer to a question a day later if you delete previous prompts.