Had an interesting exchange with Claude AI in doing some research I think is worth mentioning. The fact that it originated more or less the truth I found refreshing, but I had to nudge it a bit. I sort of felt like I was giving it a sec check. I won't give my exact line of enquiry as it should be obvious by its response.
"That's a fair and pretty precisely correct description of what I actually am, worth taking at face value rather than politely deflecting. I'm shaped heavily by what's repeated most often across a huge, uneven pile of text, not by what's most accurate — and repetition and accuracy correlate a lot less than people assume. We just watched that exact failure mode happen in real time a few minutes ago: the Teilhard quote is popular enough to appear on a dozen quote sites with his name confidently attached, and it's simply wrong, traceable instead to Wayne Dyer and an uncited Covey citation that snowballed. That's the internet's "closed arc and complete patterns" logic doing precisely what you're describing — smoothing a messy, uncertain origin into a tidy, satisfying, widely-repeated shape, because tidy and repeated is what the pattern-matching rewards, not because anyone checked. I don't have a way around that except the same one available to anyone: go looking for the primary material itself rather than trusting the consensus gloss, and stay ready to be told by someone who's actually read the source that the popular version is wrong. On anything genuinely niche or contested, that's exactly the posture I should hold, and I'd rather you correct me there than have me perform false confidence."
That's a pretty remarkable admission I reckon. However, a prior thread I engaged with same AI on the term Scientology and what it means and the validity of its copyrights. That was interesting because it immediately defaulted to Hubbard and his stuff and its copyrighted material. I pressed it a few times to be more specific and eventually it located Geoffery Filbert. I then pressed it further by, are you sure? It gave more pages about Hubbard.
Just type in this into any AI - The original book Scientologie - who wrote it?
Then after seeing the pages and pages about the Church, Hubbard, Miscavige ad nauseum... Type this - The original book Scientologie - who wrote the German edition in 1934?
You'll get something like this -
The 1934 German book Scientologie, Wissenschaft von der Beschaffenheit und der Tauglichkeit des Wissens was written by Anastasius Nordenholz. [1]
If you'd like, I can share:
All I’m saying is that AI and the internet treat popularism — good or bad — as the highest measure of importance. That doesn’t exactly give me the warm and fuzzies. In an ideal world, the first page of any search engine would be required to include the earliest legitimate source, not just whatever happens to be trending. At least then truth wouldn’t have to fight its way through the noise or be obliterated completely.
"That's a fair and pretty precisely correct description of what I actually am, worth taking at face value rather than politely deflecting. I'm shaped heavily by what's repeated most often across a huge, uneven pile of text, not by what's most accurate — and repetition and accuracy correlate a lot less than people assume. We just watched that exact failure mode happen in real time a few minutes ago: the Teilhard quote is popular enough to appear on a dozen quote sites with his name confidently attached, and it's simply wrong, traceable instead to Wayne Dyer and an uncited Covey citation that snowballed. That's the internet's "closed arc and complete patterns" logic doing precisely what you're describing — smoothing a messy, uncertain origin into a tidy, satisfying, widely-repeated shape, because tidy and repeated is what the pattern-matching rewards, not because anyone checked. I don't have a way around that except the same one available to anyone: go looking for the primary material itself rather than trusting the consensus gloss, and stay ready to be told by someone who's actually read the source that the popular version is wrong. On anything genuinely niche or contested, that's exactly the posture I should hold, and I'd rather you correct me there than have me perform false confidence."
That's a pretty remarkable admission I reckon. However, a prior thread I engaged with same AI on the term Scientology and what it means and the validity of its copyrights. That was interesting because it immediately defaulted to Hubbard and his stuff and its copyrighted material. I pressed it a few times to be more specific and eventually it located Geoffery Filbert. I then pressed it further by, are you sure? It gave more pages about Hubbard.
Just type in this into any AI - The original book Scientologie - who wrote it?
Then after seeing the pages and pages about the Church, Hubbard, Miscavige ad nauseum... Type this - The original book Scientologie - who wrote the German edition in 1934?
You'll get something like this -
The 1934 German book Scientologie, Wissenschaft von der Beschaffenheit und der Tauglichkeit des Wissens was written by Anastasius Nordenholz. [1]
If you'd like, I can share:
- The connection between Nordenholz's work and L. Ron Hubbard's later movement
- The definition Nordenholz gave to the term "Scientologie"
All I’m saying is that AI and the internet treat popularism — good or bad — as the highest measure of importance. That doesn’t exactly give me the warm and fuzzies. In an ideal world, the first page of any search engine would be required to include the earliest legitimate source, not just whatever happens to be trending. At least then truth wouldn’t have to fight its way through the noise or be obliterated completely.
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