Zombie stats: Where the numbers AI quotes come from

To me the dream of AI is: an agent can do the drudge work of tracking every statement down to the supporting reference, documentation and ultimately the work involved in verifying.

It is NOT being used for this, instead we want faster “answers” that avoid due diligence. Same as always but lazier.

I can't decide if the report's writing ("One number, followed" & "Quoted by all five. Sourced by none.") is being lazy or ironic?

I know Perplexity isn't often talked about anymore but their design of every sentence needing to be able to be referenced back to an actual source (like an academic peer reviewed paper) seems like a super power for trust.

A full 40% of AI stats actually have a specific study behind them? Knowing how the human baseline is that 73.6%* of all statistics are made up on the spot, this is really encouraging.

*That particular stat was of course made up, but not by me.

It just goes to show that when AIs are relied upon to recall information, they may hallucinate.

It lends credence to the theory that a smaller model without the ghost of information past, could do better with ability to search the web, although this is heavily reliant on the effectiveness of the search engine itself.

There is a human/user element here as well - will the users check the citations, if they are provided inline? I recall in the early ChatGPT web search and Perplexity days, most of the citations didn't work (made up, or 404). You get a false sense of security by having a "[1]" next to the stat or a claim. Maybe labs companies should have some additional quality ranking/checks on these, if it's in their interest of course.

Google's AI is extremely prone to making up random shit that doesn't exist. Swedish is an agglutinative language (like German) so you can join multiple words together to form new words: tomat (tomato) + jos (juice) => tomatjos. Most conjoined words are nonsense, but Google will still happily "explain" what they mean. Some examples:

tangentbordskanin (keyboard bunny): keycaps for mechanical keyboards with bunny images on them

indianbokföring (Indian accounting): simple accounting outside of legal norms

bokföringsindian (Indian accountant): informal, older term for an auditor

potatisbensinskämt (potatoe petrol joke): a type of classic absurd riddles or word plays

And it regularly lies about local stuff, e.g., it says that coffee shop A has lower prices than coffee shop B when it's the opposite in reality.

This article is complete slop and not worth looking at, but it's an issue worth discussing.

One of the original php2shell announcement posts (which was clearly AI written) claimed that 70% of websites use PHP. This number has now been repeated by every single article about php2shell, including in the most trusted tech news outlets.

I think it could have been approximately true in 2008, but not in 2026. The number is too round anyway. Trying to search for a source to the claim is now impossible.

If the basis of a reliable fact is consensus, then every AI model should now consider this fact to be true. In reality consensus is not useful of course, offhand facts are frequently generated by citogenesis. An article mentioning a stat offhand is not a source. A source should take some amount of epistemic responsibility for a claim.

Just an thinly veiled ad for something called trakkr. Not to mention that none of these "stats" actually matter aside from being the type of thing that a consultant would put in a pitch deck, at which point their accuracy doesn't matter anyways

Never trust a statistic you haven't sneaked into the training corpus yourself.

Better to be on the 40% or the 60%? Seems like both sides will bite you in the ass to an extent

That's why a transparent attribution graph is paramount for trust-worthy AI. Otherwise paid disinformation campaigns, as already spewed out by for-hire private-spy agencies (NSO and similar) and 'LLM-SEO' in general, to poison LLMs will deteriorate LLM search to become as enshitiffied as the 'classic google/bing/etc ad-driven' search beforehand.

Ah yes. The AI slop blogpost calling out AI slop statistics. We must go deeper

So no different, than humans repeating facts we hear every day as 1 in 5 dentists tells us

when people say "there should be no AI taught in schools ever. prompting? what skill is there in talking to a liar bot?" this is where they are dead wrong. Being correctly critical of LLM output is a huge skill and news flash it applies to people and human-written things too.

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