3
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
3 points (57.9% liked)
Science
18864 readers
13 users here now
Subscribe to see new publications and popular science coverage of current research on your homepage
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
I want to point you towards (gestures broadly at everything) where LLMs are being sold as panacea and things like hallucinations and overconfidence are being minimized. The AI industry is claiming these tools are a way to remove the human in the loop, and are trustworthy.
You may understand that a LLM is a starting point, not an end, but the way most people are being sold them is different and dangerous. Articles like the one you posted, which also downplayed the mistakes the model made ("Gemini made some minor numerical errors...") while suggesting that it made a novel discovery about the source material are problematic. How many people just read the headline, or the whole article, and now assume that the data presented is fact, when the data presented is an unconfirmed opinion at best and made up at worst.
LLMs are really good at making "smart sounding" text that reads like someone intelligent wrote it, but we have tons of examples where smart-sounding and factual are a Venn Diagram that doesn't overlap.
You may not realize how scientific process works, but it's not based on trust. What actually happens is that researchers publish a paper that explains their thesis, and provides supporting evidence. Then you have this thing called peer review where other experts in the field examine the findings and make their own assessments. The reality is that hallucinations and fabrications aren't exclusive to LLMs, humans do this stuff all the time all on their own. This is why we have the scientific method in the first place.
You may not realize that AI evangelism is not only in the scientific community. Articles like this, claiming AI is doing something amazing, something that humans have been unable to do, is propaganda.
Peer review is great. The average reader of that article is assuming the peer review is complete by the time they read it. Even if that isn't true. The takeaway for them is not "this annotation was likely made by a German scribe at XYZ date" the point of the article is that "Gemini figured out something that stumped human researchers".
And I refute the original position: the notes are not inscrutable and I doubt a human has never translated the numerals or analyzed the script to guess age. It just wasn't important enough to write an article until it made AI look good.
The article is propaganda. It's neat, but if you read it as "look at this cool thing llms can do..." Then you fell for it.
The fact of the matter is that this is a perfect example of LLM actually doing something useful and helping researchers figure things out. I also love how you're now playing an expert on deciphering ancient scripts. You should go let the researchers know asap what a bunch of dummies they are for not being able to figure it out on their own.
Maybe find a new hobby other than sealioning into threads to screech about how much you hate LLMs. It's frankly tiring of watching people perseverate over it.