Discussion
I don't want to bore anyone with the details but I'm starting to notice how misinformation can propagate through LLM generated pages... and it's bad.
When you hear "misinformation" you think probably think about slanderous political lies, or propaganda, and that's out there too. I'm talking about something much more boring and hard to clean up.
Of course this isn't a new problem with information. It's been a problem in scholarship, and on the internet for decades.
"Factoids"
@futurebird "factoid" refers to any member of the superfamily Factoidea, though not necessarily especially close to Factus factus. More importantly, recent advances in genetics and cladistics have revealed many taxa long thought "factoids" are in fact much more distantly related, having in many cases diverged from the lineage leading to Factus fact as far back as Cambrian or even Ediacaran times.
@llewelly @futurebird if it's not from the French county of Fact, it's just a lie with bubbles.
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A "factoid" has the shape and feel of a fact. And it might even be true, or partially true, but when you run down its history, the origin? You just go around in circles.
It can start when someone makes an educated guess, or when someone misremembers something true, then it's repeated and the factoid slowly works its way up the chain of credible sources. From blog posts to news articles, from news articles to review papers and then only if someone *checks* is it ever stopped.