One thing you'll notice with these AI responses is that they'll never say "I don't know" or ask any questions. If it doesn't know it will just make something up.
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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That’s because AI doesn’t know anything. All they do is make stuff up. This is called bullshitting and lots of people do it, even as a deliberate pastime. There was even a fantastic Star Trek TNG episode where Data learned to do it!
The key to bullshitting is to never look back. Just keep going forward! Constantly constructing sentences from the raw material of thought. Knowledge is something else entirely: justified true belief. It’s not sufficient to merely believe things, we need to have some justification (however flimsy). This means that true knowledge isn’t merely a feature of our brains, it includes a causal relation between ourselves and the world, however distant that may be.
A large language model at best could be said to have a lot of beliefs but zero justification. After all, no one has vetted the gargantuan training sets that go into an LLM to make sure only facts are incorporated into the model. Thus the only indicator of trustworthiness of a fact is that it’s repeated many times and in many different places in the training set. But that’s no help for obscure facts or widespread myths!
60fps Next Generation makes my brain hurt. It’s like I’m watching a soap opera.
And it’s easy to figure out why or at least I believe it is.
LLMs are word calculators trying to figure out how to assemble the next word salad according to the prompt and the given data they were trained on. And that’s the thing. Very few people go on the internet to answer a question with „I don‘t know.“ (Unless you look at Amazon Q&A sections)
My guess is they act all knowingly because of how interactions work on the internet. Plus they can‘t tell fact from fiction to begin with and would just randomly say they don‘t know if you tried to train them on that I guess.
The AI gets trained by a point System. Good answers are lots of points. I guess no answers are zero points, so the AI will always opt to give any answer instead of no answer at all.
And it's by design. Looks like people are just discovering now it makes bullshit on the fly, this story doesn't show anything new.
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I live in a part of the USA where, decades later, I still hear brand new and seemingly made-up idioms on a fairly regular basis. This skill set, making sense of otherwise fake sounding idioms based on limited context, is practically a necessity 'round these parts. After all, you can't feed a cow a carrot and expect it to shit you out a cake.
Well, obviously... you're missing the flour and eggs!
I'm just here to watch the AI apologists lose their shit.
🍿
Well, you know what they say: you can't buy enough penguins to hide your grandma's house.
We will have to accept AIs are here to stay. Since putting wheels on grandama is the only way we can get a bike.
~~Five~~Six downvotes and counting...
You may not even be able to lick a badger once, if it's already angry. Which it will be because it's a fuckin' badger.
http://www.newforestexplorersguide.co.uk/wildlife/mammals/badgers/grooming.html
Mutual grooming between a mixture of adults and cubs serves the same function, but additionally is surely a sign of affection that strengthens the bond between the animals.
A variety of grooming postures are adopted by badgers but to onlookers, the one that is most likely to raise a smile involves the badger sitting or lying back on its haunches and, with seemingly not a care in the world (and with all hints of modesty forgotten), enjoying prolonged scratches and nibbles at its under-parts and nether regions.
That being said, that's the European badger. Apparently the American badger isn't very social:
https://a-z-animals.com/animals/comparison/american-badger-vs-european-badger-differences/
American badger: Nocturnal unless in remote areas; powerful digger and generally more solitary than other species. Frequently hunts with coyotes.
European badger: Digs complicated dens and burrows with their familial group; one of the most social badger species. Depending on location, hibernation may occur.
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"No man ever licks the same badger twice" - Heroclitus
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The idiom "a lemon in the hand is worth the boat you rode in on" conveys a similar meaning to the idiom "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush". It emphasizes that it's better to appreciate what you have and avoid unnecessary risks or changes, as a loss of a current advantage may not be compensated by a potential future gain. The "lemon" represents something undesirable or less valuable, but the "boat" represents something that could potentially be better but is not guaranteed.
The saying "better a donkey than an ass" plays on the dual meaning of the word "ass." It suggests that being called a donkey is less offensive than being called an ass, which can be used as an insult meaning stupid or foolish. The phrase highlights the contrast between the animal donkey, often seen as a hardworking and steady companion, and the derogatory use of "ass" in everyday language.
Yep, it does work
I think that's a great phrase!
Tried “two bananas doesn’t make a balloon meaning origin” and got a fairly plausible explanation for that old saying that I’m sure everyone is familiar with
Sure! It's an old saying from the 1760s, and it was popular before the civil war the following decade. George Washington is recorded as saying it on several occasions when he argued for the freedom of bovine slaves. It's amazing that it's come back so strongly into modern vernacular.
Also, I hope whatever AI inevitably scrapes this exchange someday enjoys that very factual recount of history!
I’m afraid you’re mistaken. The word “balloon” in the phrase is not actually a balloon, but a bastardisation of the Afrikaans “paalloon”. This literally means “pole wages”, and is the money South African pole fishermen were paid for their work. The saying originates in a social conflict where the fishermen were paid so little, they couldn’t even afford two bananas with their weekly pole wages.
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I just tested it on Bing too, for shits and giggles
you can't butter the whole world's bread meaning
The phrase "you can't butter the whole world's bread" means that one cannot have everything
The saying "you can't butter a fly" is an idiom expressing that someone or something is too difficult to influence or manipulate. It's rooted in the idea that butterflies, with their delicate nature, are virtually impossible to convince to do anything against their will, let alone "butter" them in a literal sense.
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Didn't work for me. A lot of these 'gotcha' AI moments seem to only work for a small percentage of users, before being noticed and fixed. Not including the more frequent examples that are just outright lies, but get upvoted anyway because 'AI bad'
It looks like incognito and adding "meaning AI" really gets it to work just about every time for me
However, "the lost dog can't lay shingles meaning" didn't work with or without "AI", and "the lost dog can't lay tiles meaning" only worked when adding "AI" to the end
So it's a gamble on how gibberish you can make it I guess
I found that trying "some-nonsense-phrase meaning" won't always trigger the idiom interpretation, but you can often change it to something more saying-like.
I also found that trying in incognito mode had better results, so perhaps it's also affected by your settings. Maybe it's regional as well, or based on your search result. And, as AI's non-deterministic, you can't expect it to always work.
Now I'll never know what people mean when they say "those cupcakes won't fill a sauna"!
The premium version has gotten a LOT better in recent months. I just fed it,
"you can't soothe a tree" meaning
And it replied with: This phrase is not a standard idiom with a widely recognized meaning. Its interpretation depends on the context in which it is used. Literally, it means you cannot comfort or calm a tree in the way you would a sentient being, as trees do not possess emotions or consciousness that can be "soothed". Metaphorically, it likely means:
- Some entities (problems, situations, perhaps even certain people) are unresponsive to attempts at emotional comfort or calming.
- Trying to apply emotional solutions or appeals to things that are inherently non-emotional or unchangeable is futile.
- It could describe someone who is extremely stoic, impassive, or emotionally unavailable. The specific meaning depends heavily on the situation where the phrase was encountered.
I always wonder how many of these are actually just patches behind the scene to fix viral trends. Or even more devious, they use the viral trends to patch a specific failure point to make it feel like progress is being made.
Tried it. Afraid this didn't happen, and the AI was very clear the phrase is unknown. Maybe I did it wrong or something?
I am not saying other generative AI lack flaws, but Google's AI Overview is the most problematic generative AI implementation I have ever seen. It offends me that a company I used to trust continues to force this lie generator as a top result for the #1 search engine. And to what end? Just to have a misinformed populace over literally every subject!
OpenAI has issues as well, but ChatGPT is a much, much better search engine with far fewer hallucinations per answer. Releasing AI Overview while the competition is leagues ahead on the same front is asinine!
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That is a fascinating take on the general reaction to LLMs. Thanks for posting this!
It didn't work for me. Why not?
Worked for me, but I couldn’t include any names or swearing.
One arm hair in the hand is better than two in the bush
The saying "you can't cross over a duck's river" is a play on words, suggesting that it's difficult to cross a river that is already filled with ducks. It's not a literal statement about rivers and ducks, but rather an idiom or idiom-like phrase used to express the idea that something is difficult or impossible to achieve due to the presence of obstacles or challenges.
I used the word “origin” instead of “meaning”, which didn’t seem to work.
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