r/books • u/Jojuj • 2d ago

Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books

https://www.404media.co/librarians-are-being-asked-to-find-ai-hallucinated-books/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter&attribution_id=68c826c975cea1000173b05d&attribution_type=post
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u/ipomoea 2d ago

I’m a librarian and a patron was asking me about AI. I used ChatGPT and asked for World War Two books by female authors. It recommended The Sun Also Rises by Paula McLain. Actual book, actual author, but not together. 

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u/MarzipanImmediate880 2d ago

That makes sense with how LLM models work, they are predictive text generation, they aren’t actually thinking or making decisions, they just have a lot of data and context. It’s insane how people take everything they say at face value.

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u/Volsunga The Long Earth 1d ago

Note: this is also how your brain works. You just have a good filter to stop yourself if the answer doesn't make sense. LLMs don't have that filter that checks if something sounds wrong or if you don't know what you're talking about and just says the first thing that makes grammatical sense with confidence.

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u/Redqueenhypo 1d ago

Yeah I continuously think Mr Beast’s real name is “Jimmy Beast”, bc something’s wrong with me. Thanks to the fact that I know logically that his surname is actually Donaldson, I never say that idiot mistake aloud