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ben_wtoday at 11:31 AM1 replyview on HN

> If you feed it enough flat-earther content, as well a physics books, an LLM will happily tells you that the earth is flat, and explain you with lots of physics why it cannot be flat.

This is a terrible example, because it's what humans do as well. See religious, or indeed military, indoctrination. All propaganda is as effective as it is, because the same message keeps getting hammered in.

And not just that, common misconceptions abound everywhere and not just conspiracy theories, religion, and politics. My dad absolutely insisted that the water draining in toilets or sinks are meaningfully influenced by the Coriolis effect, used an example of one time he went to the equator and saw a demonstration of this on both sides of the equator. University education and lifetime career in STEM, should have been able to figure out from first principles why the Coriolis effect is exactly zero on the equator itself, didn't.

> A human will learn one or the other first, and once the initial learning is made, it will disregards all the evidence of the contrary, until maybe at some point it doesn't and switches side entirely.

We don't have any way to know what a human would do if they could read the entire internet, because we don't live long enough to try.

The only bet I'd make is that we'd be more competent than any AI doing the same, because we learn faster from fewer examples, but that's about it.

> LLMs don't have an inner representation of the world and as such they don't have an opinion about the world.

There is evidence that they do have some inner representation of the world, e.g.:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02996

https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18202


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littlestymaartoday at 12:05 PM

> This is a terrible example, because it's what humans do as well. See religious, or indeed military, indoctrination. All propaganda is as effective as it is, because the same message keeps getting hammered in.

You completely misread my point.

The key thing with humans isn't that they cannot believe in bullshit. They can definitely do. But we don't usually believe in both the bullshit and in the fact the BS is actually BS. We have opinions on the BS. And we, as a species, routinely die or kill for these opinions, by the way. LLM don't care about anything.

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