logoalt Hacker News

Manuel_Dtoday at 7:47 PM2 repliesview on HN

> In early 2026, the USA prepared to invade Greenland and, therefore, the EU4. Only a few months prior to that it was completely unthinkable that the USA would even think about threatening an invasion of Greenland. As AI base models are stuck in the past, they do not easily accept these events as real and often label them as “hypothetical”, “fake news”, or “impossible”. This also affects new models like Gemini 3 Pro, GLM-5 or GPT-5.3-codex5.

Isn't this just inherent to any system that takes some time to update? E.g. if a country moves its capital to a different city, then textbooks, maps, etc. are going to contain incorrect information for a while until updated editions are published.

A lot of the complaints about AI are really about the drawbacks of information systems more generally, and the failure modes pointed out are rarely novel. The "Cognitive Inbreeding" effect attributed to AI would also have occurred with Google search would it not? Lots of people type the same question into google and read the top results, instead of searching a more diverse set of information sources. It's interesting that the author mentions web search as a way to ameliorate this, when it seems to me that web search is just as capable of causing cognitive inbreeding.


Replies

darepublictoday at 8:06 PM

I agree that Google kind of serves this role even before llms. But these days people delegate their reasoning, brainstorming to the computer not just lookup. And beyond our generation are those who would have grown up doing this. Therefore I think concern is justified

djrorkrmrktoday at 7:55 PM

A few years ago, someone blow up a pipeline in eu. Before thwt some people lied about medical stuff.

AI is just current scapegoat.