Comment by regenschutz
19 days ago
Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.
I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.
The CIA World Factbook was one of the major sites to access for information using Gopher. I discovered it using Gopher and it was proof to me of the usefulness of Internet. I would cite it as a reason that someone might want to access the internet.
Can you add context on what Gopher is for the unknowning? I searched for it but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) is the only seemingly relavent thing I found not sure if thats exactly what your refering too?
Gopher was a text-mode, menu-based, hypertext-based precursor to the World Wide Web. It's what we used before the Web and web browsers came along.
Here's a good image of your typical Gopher page: https://img.sysnettechsolutions.com/What-is-Gopher-Nedir-EN....
This video [0] shows someone using Gopher (and other common pre-web Internet tools) in the early 90s.
I used Gopher when I did a high school summer science camp at Indiana University in 1994. It was a really interesting time of transition when the graphical Web was just coming on-line with Mosaic, but most tools were still textual/command line (FTP, pine/elm email/Usenet clients, MUDs, etc.)
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDV4zrex18o
It predated the World Wide Web as a client for browsing. It was developed at the University of Minnesota and named for the School's mascot.
The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data. One would access an initial site by typing in it's IP address or domain name. One could then follow the gopher links until exhaustion or all the links on that site were visited.
There was a period of time before the WWW was graphical and I found gopher far superior for browsing. One had to download files and then view them locally using local tools.
One could even follow a gopher link to the WWW. The splash page had the slogan "Welcome to the World Wide Web there is no top or bottom". This could not be said of Gopher sites where each site had to be connected to directly and all the links on the site could be visited.
Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical. This made the Gopher less useful since it was stuck as terminal browser. The IP address made the machine one was browsing from addressable to every host on the internet. This made inline graphics more practical because they could be rendered in line while browsing.
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I feel really old now. :(
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At least Wikipedia is supposed to cite its sources, while AIs don’t.
AIs that were trained on data obtained through naughty channels actively avoid citing sources and full passages of reference text, otherwise they'd give the game away. This seems to increase the chance of them entirely hallucinating sources too.
Have you used one recently? The big providers all cite sources if give a research prompt.
Unfortunately, the citations are generally quite low quality and have in my experience a high rate of not actually supporting the text they're attached to.
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In my experience they just add random links at the bottom that are often unrelated to the response they give; there’s absolutely no guarantee that they did read them or that their response is based on them.
Sometimes they hallucinate them, or if they exist, sources include blatant nonsense (like state owned propaganda, such as RT) / don't support the claims made by the output.
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Do you people even use the models or do you just lie about them?
https://chatgpt.com/share/6984c899-6cc4-8013-a8f6-ec204ee631...
You're using the Research model that isn't available to Free users. As a pupil myself, I can vouch for the fact that nobody is using the Research models here.
Even if a pupil does pay, they will either be too lazy to wait the nearly 10 minutes it takes for the AI to do its research, or they actually care about getting good grades and therefore won't outsource their research to AI.
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No worries, we can rely on our Dear Leader and his team of experts to keep us informed.
> Wikipedia
There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia, at least in the main languages. It's crowdsourced and has citations (and where there aren't "citation needed" help identify that).
It gives you superficial, in depth and factual information, with links to sources for more details if needed.
There's nothing at all wrong with Wikipedia but it needs sources to cite since it doesn't allow original research and the World Factbook is an important one.
>There's nothing at all wrong with Wikipedia
Well, except for the very obvious political bias
https://manhattan.institute/article/new-study-finds-politica...
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"Facebook" :)
Surely there's a lot of CIA involvement there too ;-)
Oh wow, didn't at all notice that while typing lol. I guess my swipe-to-type skills aren't as good as I thought they were
I initially read it as Facebook as well and almost celebrated :D
Isnt it already in AI as the prior version were publicly and should be in training corpus?
The World Factbook was updated weekly. This was because facts changed.
Every time an article like this gets posted some commenter INEVITABLY brings up "isn't this solved because AI" and god it is so depressing. Apparently a whole lot of people out there existing in the world genuinely think fucking LLMs are going to be reliable stewards of knowledge.
We are fucking cooked.
Ai training can be thought of like human training (school), much of what you learn shapes you but you forget the details. We need to continue to have real sources of info.
Sure but that doesn't mean it'll perfectly retrieve information it's trained on. There's a lot of conflicting sources, hallucinations, etc.
See the positive. At least you would not get a fail on your school essay about Greenland...
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I guess your sarcasm is not popular in this thread. Perhaps Musk-fatigue.
Most sarcasm worsens discussion. The comment guidelines say Don't be snarky.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Its not sarcasm. Grok if an awesome alternative view if you accept that you should use your brain to make your own opinion and not just accept wikipedia (which can be wrong) as truth.
> Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.
A source of propaganda? There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.
> There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.
Even then, political motivation in itself does not make it inaccurate. It’s easy to see why a liberal democracy supposed to defend liberty across the globe would be interested in making facts accessible. Facts and education are the best way to fight obscurantism and totalitarianism. It’s also easy to see why a regime sliding back towards autocracy would have no interest in doing it. If they were competent, they could have continued pretending they cared and actually use it as a propaganda tool. Same with Radio Liberty and the others.
there used to be a higher alignment in the US between political motivations and morality.
>It’s easy to see why a liberal democracy supposed to defend liberty across the globe would be interested in making facts accessible.
Who is supposed to defend liberty across the globe? Do you think the US has been doing that and should be doing that?
The point of OP was that the facts from the CIA can’t be trusted. That they can lie about the facts.
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The Factbook has always been widely regarded as a reliable source of information.
By the Western world aligned with the US?
I would hope that most people do understand that the CIA is a heavily biased source to use on information on other countries.. like wtf?
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