Episode Details

"Sometimes the AI just makes stuff up" is a problem I don't really expect to go away. In the nearterm, AI is going to keep occasionally hallucinating, or misinterpreting information. Eventually, AI will be powerful enough we need to be worried if it's presenting misleading information on purpose.

There might be a nice window where the AI is powerful enough to not make things up but non-agentic enough that we don't have to worry about deliberate manipulation. But, even then, interpreting data is tricky.

I'm worried about this for my own use, but, I'm more worried about this on the global scale. I'm worried about people trusting things AI made up, and I'm worried about the internet proliferating with slop that makes it harder to even find original statements that are a human's real testimony.

An approach that might help is to make AI reports more "Verification centric."

Right now, some AI chatbots provides little citation-links. That's better than not-having-them. But, those are a pain to open and investigate. Probably you very rarely do so.

So, imagine a world where when you answer a question, the AI doesn't guess. Instead:

• It finds a primary source.
• It [...]

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First published:
May 14th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mpoEKJbqQvrRHqn3e/verification-centric-ai

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.