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chvid 11 hours ago [-]
"But ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Thursday that Hoskins’s purported work was generated using its chatbot by users based in Iran as part of an “influence campaign.”"
Sock puppet accounts and fake opinion pieces are nothing new.
The new thing is a super centralized "tool" that besides doing your writing for you, logs everything, judges it, and reports to authorities and news outlets as it sees fit.
estearum 10 hours ago [-]
... well that's one thing that's new.
The other thing that's new (and more structurally relevant, since obviously not all LLMs do what you describe) is the dramatic reduction in cost affiliated with this strategy.
It's (literally) unbelievable that this many allegedly sophisticated people on HN have no concept of cost and what dramatic cost reductions can achieve.
intended 9 hours ago [-]
Structural issues, the way LLMs and even social media behave at scale are the heart of the problems being faced.
There's new socio economic groups that are "profitable" to target with phishing attacks, because LLMs made it cheaper in 2024-25.
pessimizer 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Smoofer 7 hours ago [-]
“These days, newspapers will collaborate to not acknowledge that a killer was a transwoman and not actually a woman.”
Assuming you’re taking about Tumbler Ridge due to the new FBI charges…
Nearly every article I saw about the new FBI charges mentioned the shooter and collaborator being trans.
Then it took me 2 seconds to find the NYT article from the week of the shooting which also mentions the shooter being trans. Obviously all the right wing outlets mentioned it… so what are you on about?
I’m with you on the point about putting state media out there to let people make their own decisions, but you lost the plot with the trans conspiracy theory nonsense
This is no different than Chatgpt picking up a RadioFree* think piece in the grand scheme.
stogot 6 hours ago [-]
Radio free is not sanctioned
OgsyedIE 12 hours ago [-]
Given the plurality of self-hosting options there is no reason to believe that it's not that case that every government on Earth is doing it to some extent.
Perhaps the real problem is too much acceptance of shoddy verification.
"Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda."
in 2024.. hopefully filters when training have gotten better, but maybe not..
gregglain 3 hours ago [-]
We know the solution to the decline of journalistic integrity but it's hostile to profits.
capitainenemo 1 hours ago [-]
I'm curious what that would have to do with a state controlled news company generating millions of spam articles.
mdp2021 6 hours ago [-]
> poisoning the
Reminder that an intelligent entity does not believe or repeat something it has read even a million times: reminder that now that LLMs exist, we must find the real recipe ASAP.
jddj 6 hours ago [-]
I'm concerned there are probably far more counterexamples of this in human history and society than there are examples.
mdp2021 6 hours ago [-]
I wrote «an intelligent entity», very clearly - not "somebody supposed to be intelligent".
Of course there can be more examples of intellectual failures than of intellectual accomplished ones. And again, this calls for the urgency of finally injecting supplies of intelligence into the systems.
I wonder how much Russian propaganda worked its way into western academia over the 20th century? Very similar.
solid_fuel 9 hours ago [-]
Somehow I am not surprised to see you repeating the red scare here. This attitude is anti-intellectual and destructive.
rayiner 7 hours ago [-]
The New York Times did a multi-article hagiography of communism on the 100th anniversary of the russian revolution, with articles like “how to parent like a bolshevik.” https://www.nytimes.com/column/red-century. Insofar as “scare” implies a reaction to something that isn’t real—no, there was no “red scare.” The communist infiltration was real.
5 hours ago [-]
solid_fuel 7 hours ago [-]
The New York times publishing an article you don’t like is not “communist infiltration”. In this country, we have a right to free speech, including free press.
rayiner 7 hours ago [-]
Wistful coverage of the Soviet Union in 2017 is communist infiltration. Sure, communists have the right to free speech. But I'm likewise entitled to call them what they are.
jrflowers 6 hours ago [-]
You think Soviets were writing in the New York Times three decades after the collapse of the USSR?
rayiner 6 hours ago [-]
I think people one-shotted by "Russian propaganda" were working at the NYT in 2017, yes.
Remember, the discussion upthread was about Russian propaganda making its way into AI models. Similarly, my point was about Soviet propaganda making its way into the training materials for academics, journalists, etc. I didn't say they were actual Soviets.
jrflowers 5 hours ago [-]
Why would Russia be pushing communism in 2017?
rayiner 5 hours ago [-]
My point is that Russian propaganda from the 20th century made its way into intellectual water supply just like Russian propaganda from the 21st century. The propaganda is different, but the mechanism has parallels.
jrflowers 4 hours ago [-]
So it is communist infiltration of the variety where there were no communists and there was no infiltration, just somebody read a book or whatever and then wrote about it?
rayiner 3 hours ago [-]
You keep changing the words. Above you said “Soviets.” I don’t think they’re soviets. But I do think they’re communists. So “communist infiltration” is accurate.
capitainenemo 11 hours ago [-]
(I do find it interesting, btw, that a few seconds after post this did get an immediate downvote to 0 - it didn't last, but it makes me wonder if there are bots monitoring the HN firehose for anything critical of country X)
SoftTalker 11 hours ago [-]
Possible, certainly. On the one hand the HN audience is not very big in the grand scheme of things, but they probably do skew to more influential and likely to be politically active than the average person. If it's worth doing, it's almost certainly being done.
mdp2021 8 hours ago [-]
> if there are
There are easier explanations. A hundred people are checking and occasionally the page, with new posts added every couple of minutes: clearly some will meet a post at "0 minutes", read it as fresh, and possibly react. I have seen it.
capitainenemo 7 hours ago [-]
sure, that's simplest scenario, just seemed odd that was the first vote. and it's not like writing or running a bot is hard and political stories seem like they'd be a popular target to me.
vkou 10 hours ago [-]
What about other hostile propaganda? Do you think the completely deranged, self-serving, lying, dangerous shit that regularly comes out of DC is being incorporated in those training materials?
This regime and its enablers have done more quantifiable harm to more people and institutions in America than anything Russia has, and one of its favorite tools is propaganda.
grafmax 10 hours ago [-]
Those Russian propagandists. Lucky the US doesn't engage in propaganda.
stickfigure 9 hours ago [-]
There's something special about propaganda served up with hot polonium tea.
EA-3167 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
sedan_baklazhan 8 hours ago [-]
AI companies: stealing data everywhere to feed their models, paying no one for it.
Also AI companies: oh no, You’ve poisoned our models with your data!
mdp2021 7 hours ago [-]
> stealing
As disturbing as "you would not steal a <whatever>" in the times of pro-copyright brainwashing. What is published is there for people to read, and most societies already decided through libraries: for free, with charges on the State.
> [all caps]
Pls reread the guidelines. Check the page visually, see why. Edit the post pls. while you can.
gustavus 12 hours ago [-]
I don't think it is a verification problem. It wasn't like before in the days of controlled media and radio there wasn't a narrative to push, it's just that most people didnt have any awareness of alternatives.
Nowadays people are more aware of alternative viewpoints or perspectives. The solution isn't to try and force one approved source of truth, but to just assume everyone is trying to push their version of the truth and examine it critically.
My understanding is that this is the way France operates where you assume all the media is hostile and you view it all critically. In America this is a bit of a shock because for a long time we had trusted arbiters of truth and now that they are less trusted we've been trying to look for alternatives rather realizing it should all be examined critically.
thih9 10 hours ago [-]
Finally an article that doesn't say "ChatGPT did something" and puts the spotlight on the operators.
Could we keep that wording for other news? If not, could we then say here that ChatGPT planted fake articles, for consistency?
card_zero 11 hours ago [-]
Seems I'm uneducated about how journalism works: you can just write a polished-looking opinion piece and submit it to obscure outlets, who pass it on to news sites and newspapers? Do you get paid? Or if you offer it for free, is that normal, and not suspicious?
SoftTalker 11 hours ago [-]
Been happening forever, PR departments plant news stories all the time. They just need a few willing reporters/writers to get something published to start the ball rolling.
I thought I remembered it being called "submarining" but that seems to be something else. I also thought I remembered Joel Spolsky writing about it but can't find it now.
It's quite old now, but check out the book "Trust me, I'm lying" by Ryan Holiday. Talks about how he did this as part of a marketing strategy when he was working at (IIRC) American Apparel, among other places. And how easy/often it happens in politics. Keep in mind the book is almost 15 years old, and talking about things that even at that point were what he'd done in a previous life/career.
baby 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and it’s not just obscure outlets, you can do this for big magazines people here read for the right price
PeterStuer 9 hours ago [-]
"Journalism" hasn't worked for decades. It's all nepo-baby emo diaries, subsidy milking and clickbait farming these days.
pessimizer 8 hours ago [-]
This wasn't in newspapers, this was only in marginal publications that take anything, such as Daily Kos, Middle East Monitor, and apparently the "Port St. Joe Star, a tiny Florida weekly newspaper."
Other than those, it was literally Medium and social media.
What you can do is write a polished opinion piece and tell one of your assets, or pay some politician, to publish it as an OpEd in outlets like the WaPo and NYT. Or you can get nobodies who know nothing to publish similar articles to each other in Wired, the International Business Times, and Forbes (either by "leaking" to them or because they're on your payroll), then get politicians to mention those articles in Congress and to write furious letters to WaPo and NYT accusing them of covering this story up - and then they'll write your propaganda themselves.
delichon 11 hours ago [-]
I prefer an LLM that can steelman any argument. On the whole I think it's more effective to engage with evil than to ignore it. For that purpose these planted articles are a feature. I say that as an enemy of the government of Iran.
zahlman 11 hours ago [-]
You seem to presume that the media owners are interested in critiquing and debating with submissions, rather than just selecting whatever fits their narrative.
axus 10 hours ago [-]
You can fool some of the people, all of the time. Attempting censorship to stop that isn't worth it.
cloverich 10 hours ago [-]
Need to take into account how belief and human brains work. Once human brains become locked on to something ideologically, similar to religion, its not the quality of the evidence or argument that changes minds. To an extent we're designed this way to keep the world moving, as the natural order of things is relatively indifferent to suffering. You can indeed flood segments of the world with disinformation, and by the time you move to refute it, its roots are set and actions in motion.
I don't really know what the best approach is to it, but I don't think a simple hands off, engage with the argument as such, is a winning strategy. I don't really like the alternatives any better.
supjeff 11 hours ago [-]
I kind of had the same take. If an LLM spits out legitimate arguments and they get published, i mean...
tastyfreeze 12 hours ago [-]
All news has been a tool of spooks for a very long time. The official CIA Operation Mockingbird started in the late 40s. Now that AI is involved its news? None of it can be trusted.
patrickk 11 hours ago [-]
One can only imagine how much of the news is just dictated by US intelligence. Social media too- remember the Elgin AirForce base being revealed as the top most Reddit addicted city?
Edit: Resolved now it was on my end.
> fyi not working for me
thih9 10 hours ago [-]
N=1 but it's working for me at the moment.
charlieflowers 10 hours ago [-]
Resolved it was on my end
mahdihabibi 10 hours ago [-]
Reading this from Tehran, I'm afraid of losing my access to chatGPT.
BeetleB 9 hours ago [-]
I'm sure there are a lot of differing (valid) opinions on this.
All I can say is that this highlights the need for open weights models.
> OpenAI said it had banned the accounts behind the campaign
If we knew OpenAI would always ban such activity regardless of the actor, I'd be happy. I don't know this.
cvoss 7 hours ago [-]
How does open weights address the issue of nation states injecting covert propaganda into another nation's public discourse?
BeetleB 7 hours ago [-]
Open weights ensures one company (or country) can't decide which actors are allowed to and not allowed to engage in this behavior.
Propaganda has always been there. The dynamics that allowed for all the fake news articles in 2016 to impact the elections are the same dynamics that allowed the articles in this case (shoddy news editors who aren't even verifying the identity of the authors). We didn't solve the original problem in the decade since - it's not going to be solved and is here to stay. The issue has shifted to who has access to this power.
Some random perspective: For years, I lived in an autocratic country where there was no freedom of speech and the government closely monitored all news agencies/publications in the country (before most people had Internet access). The dialog/debate was the same: "If we give freedom of expression, how will we address all the false propaganda coming in?"
Of course, times changed. They couldn't block the whole Internet, and false propaganda came in. Which version would you prefer - the one where they blocked it (but ran their own propaganda), or the one where they couldn't block it?
gizmodo59 12 hours ago [-]
how is this news? Adversarial country using AI to generate fake news goes way before AI.
JoBrad 11 hours ago [-]
It’s news because it still needs to be called out. Not everyone recognizes AI-generated content, but even if everyone did, calling it out serves a real social purpose.
hammock 12 hours ago [-]
Why does it have to be an adversarial country? Why does it have to be a country at all? Couldn’t it be the mayor of some town? Or a PR team at a fast food franchise group? Or one of SBF’s polycule members?
The notion we only see this news when it is calling out a country with which the federal government is in conflict makes me question to veracity and intent of the article itself, more than the content of it.
deepsquirrelnet 12 hours ago [-]
And what do you call it when a country acts in adversarial ways to its own citizens? Call it cynical, but it sure seems like there's a lot of that in the world right now.
fakedang 10 hours ago [-]
You call it a country :P
bilbo0s 12 hours ago [-]
Well it’s mostly other entities running influence campaigns.
Thats true.
But this article is about the influence campaigns presumably tun by the Iranian government.
bitmasher9 12 hours ago [-]
This is classic FUD, Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.
It’s designed to make the reader question which articles they have read recently that are Iranian propaganda, and sow doubt about future articles that seem to benefit Iran.
This amount of FUD always seems to increase around election time…
Telemakhos 12 hours ago [-]
It's a well-researched article that lays out evidence, not suspicions. It includes OpenAI's own investigation into accounts that were found generating op-eds for Iranian propaganda. It shows the route by which these op-eds entered into smaller publications, namely by a pacifist NGO in Oregon, and neither then NGO nor the publications saw them as propaganda, despite the origins of the op-eds.
nba456_ 11 hours ago [-]
Probably posted to this very site, no doubt.
jillesvangurp 10 hours ago [-]
Fake news on the internet is at this point a tool that has been widely used for probably at least twenty years. The history of propaganda is much older.
A big part of the problem is social networks treating very non authoritative sources as if they are authoritative based on all sorts of factors that can be manipulated or based on financial gain (somebody pais to get their content promoted).
Users of these tools include lobby groups, nation states, politicians, criminals, scammers, etc. Anyone interested in promoting their cause, sowing FUD about other people's causes, spreading misinformation, or distracting from inconvenient but accurate information.
We'll always have people like that. But we might want to think about getting better tools to deal with them. I prefer getting my news from reputable sources instead of random clickbait distributors or whatever. Keeping track of reputation for domains, people, etc. is currently hard. I don't think it's necessarily a technical problems. We've had the tools to digitally sign stuff for decades. But we're not using them effectively. People can't be bothered to sign their emails, documents, photos, articles, etc. The tools to add and check those signatures are not there or an afterthought at best.
mkovach 9 hours ago [-]
Drew Curtis figured this out in 2007 and even wrote a book about it.
xbar 7 hours ago [-]
I can think of one media outlet for whom this would be an upgrade to its accuracy.
uraniborg 9 hours ago [-]
LLMs are about as safe as the internet in 1993. Tampering with the training data to inject bias is a massive attack surface that is being ignored. It makes sense: trying to address corruption of models this way would slow down accelerationists and their zealot minions. Can’t get in the way of those sweet sweet trillions.
uraniborg 7 hours ago [-]
Downvoting out of fear.
gavinray 11 hours ago [-]
The content of these articles seems to be "the Iran war is bad for Americans", which is not propaganda though?
propaganda is also value neutral on those definitions
gustavus 12 hours ago [-]
Remember 95% of what you see or hear on the Internet is designed to sell you something either an idea or a product, and it isn't done honestly.
everdrive 12 hours ago [-]
Much of modern internet content is far worse than cable advertising in the 90s. I remember when I was a kid; I'd aggressively mute the commercials because I hated the idea that someone was attempting to influence me. The modern internet is orders of magnitude worse buy nearly any measure. The nastiest, most outrageous content is plastered on every wall. Every single person has an angle. Every bit of content meant to pull you in one direction or another, and given the addictiveness of novelty and powerful emotions, we keep coming back for more. It's an absolute disaster we don't know how to walk away from.
bilbo0s 12 hours ago [-]
>95%???
That low?
In all honesty, given the volume of comments, posts and articles that bots can generate in a given time period? I mean it’s gotta be several orders of magnitude higher than what humans can generate.
And then you factor in the fact that even most of the humans are astroturfing..
The percentage of influence campaigns we interact with has just gotta be really high.
VLM 8 hours ago [-]
They should compare it to the scale of Israel's similar activities. At least Iran isn't interfering in our elections.
WhereIsTheTruth 8 hours ago [-]
Iran? how convenient
It's like when SEA starts to distance itself from US's grip, we suddenly hear about North Korea doing missile tests
jadar 12 hours ago [-]
democracy dies in the darkness of paywalls, I guess.
baggachipz 11 hours ago [-]
It also dies in the darkness of a takeover by billionaire with an agenda.
sleep_debt 10 hours ago [-]
...as if the American government hasnt done this.
mmooss 10 hours ago [-]
Speaking of disinformation, you might notice a pattern recently:
* Opinions opposed to US administration policy on AI (including data centers) is called Chinese propaganda. A month or two ago, when someone tried to roll out a bunch of pro-data center opinions across the media (coincidentally all on the same day making similar arguments), they included this theme.
* Opinions opposed to US administration policy on Iran is called Iranian propaganda.
That's not really new: News reporting and opinions critical of the US administration have lead to the authors being called traitors, 'enemies of the people', and sometimes being prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Some leaders in the defense industry call critics of military spending and pro-warfare policies, 'traitors', etc.
Of course some could be, might be, likely is true. That's the nature of effective propaganda.
(A side effect of nationalism - 'nation uber alles', defining nation as 'what I believe' - is that individuals and freedom are relegated to second place or lower.)
This is a straight up misrepresentation. The user posts occasionally about Israel, which garners engagement and replies (in some cases from actual trolls who job is searching for mentions of Israel), but most of their top level comments are about mundane technology.
wasabi991011 10 hours ago [-]
It's not a misrepresentation: 13 out of their 21 posts are about Israel.
I don't know why you brought comments into it, the most common reading of "posts" is "submissions", not "submissions and comments".
GaryBluto 11 hours ago [-]
I guarantee that there are zero people paid to search "Israel" on Hacker News.
fn-mote 10 hours ago [-]
You’ve been here for a year and believe there is no organized campaigning over middle eastern politics? So much so that you think it’s obvious nobody would be monitoring front page articles, with no evidence? I’m trusting but I disagree here based on my own experience reading the articles which rapidly drop off for… various reasons.
newspaper1 10 hours ago [-]
You can see it happening in this very thread.
pphysch 10 hours ago [-]
You're right, they may be doing it for free.
There is an ENORMOUS "defend Israel online" industry, usually using all Jewish people as human shields for the middle eastern regime. Emissary, RiseApp, Report It, to name a few.
ecommerceguy 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
shevy-java 11 hours ago [-]
That's not the relevant question.
The relevant question is how some skew the private mass media here.
spiderice 11 hours ago [-]
So.. really fucking relevant, then?
SirFatty 12 hours ago [-]
I'm always skeptical of random comments pulling Israel into the conversation that doesn't have anything to do with Israel.
foenix 12 hours ago [-]
Explain how a war between US/Israel and Iran, that Israel started, has nothing to do with Israel?
orangedog 12 hours ago [-]
It's because the first comment is basically whataboutism. It's no even just complaining about Israel, it says that essentially WP reporting on it is somehow invalid.
dragontamer 12 hours ago [-]
Israel convinced USA to attack Iran. I'd say Israel's methods (both propaganda and visiting the President) are relevant.
It's not whataboutism, unless somehow Pearl Harbor is whataboutism to Nuking Hiroshima. Sometimes things have direct cause and effect, even if it's inconvenient to your argument.
roenxi 11 hours ago [-]
> It's not whataboutism, unless somehow Pearl Harbor is whataboutism to Nuking Hiroshima. Sometimes things have direct cause and effect, even if it's inconvenient to your argument.
Wouldn't that technically be a whataboutism? As far as I've seen it used, "whataboutism" usually means that there is a cause and effect that is inconvenient to someone's argument. Whatever a whataboutism is in the popular parlance, it isn't a logical or factual error.
Anyway, the key point here is it'd be really helpful to understand exactly what magic the Israelis used to get the US into this war. It has to be the most bizarre promise-not-kept of any US president in decades. Nobody seriously thought this sort of escapade could end well and although Trump is pretty vague he seemed clear enough in understanding that lying the US public into wars was a legacy killer. It looks like it'll re-cripple the Republicans in the same way the last Bush administration did.
dragontamer 10 hours ago [-]
They likely told Trump that the Iranians would support Trump and that Trump would be a hero.
Trump is extremely easy to manipulate. Tell Trump that his legacy will be great and he will listen to you over all of his advisors (NSA, CIA, etc. etc.). The intelligence agencies are useless because the narcissist only cares about himself.
It's been the same thing with every foreign affairs issue for over a decade now. Trump just agrees with the people who butter him up.
newspaper1 11 hours ago [-]
> it'd be really helpful to understand exactly what magic the Israelis used to get the US into this war
Epstein blackmail, that’s been pretty obvious no?
JKCalhoun 11 hours ago [-]
Is it whataboutism? I get a justlikethisism vibe from the comment.
celsoazevedo 11 hours ago [-]
> that Israel started
I usually avoid these discussions because I struggle to see good sides in the conflict (maybe the children?) and most will "whatabout" their way through a century of history...
... but with proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas (and affiliated), Houthis, etc, funded and armed by Iran, I'm not sure if the "who started the war" question is that clear-cut.
tfrancisl 11 hours ago [-]
Its pretty clear when one of the countries wants to have a Greater form of their country with much of the land said "proxies" are defending in it.
thomassmith65 10 hours ago [-]
Exporting the Islamic Revolution of Iran is a strategy in Iran's foreign policy that believes in exporting the teachings of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to achieve similar results in Islamic and even non-Islamic countries.
Incidentally, Israel's relationship with Iran was surprisingly good before the Revolution.
celsoazevedo 11 hours ago [-]
The proxies are part of Iran's "forward defence" doctrine and I think they've been open about this. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see Israel creating any "greater" form of their country that gets close to Iran.
I'm not going to defend religious fanatics of any kind, especially when there are way too many on both sides that would wipe the other side if they had their way (as seen in the last 100 years of the region), but I think anyone with a very black and white view of the situation doesn't fully understand it.
tfrancisl 10 hours ago [-]
I'm not going to engage with willful ignorance about the concept of Greater Israel. The zionists want most of lebanon, syria, all of the west bank, parts of Jordan. They have laid this out clearly.
celsoazevedo 10 hours ago [-]
They all have laid out their ideas. That's why I struggle to see good sides here, why I won't defend Israel's actions or Iran's, and especially why I refuse to take sides with religious nuts of any type.
According to Iran, the proxies are part of their forward defence strategy. Maybe you think that's needed, but that's not what I'm arguing.
Unless you consider that attacking a country known for strong reactions (and over-reactions) is a good strategy for those on the receiving end of said reaction, you can't think of the proxies as organizations that exist to protect the poor civilians.
SirFatty 9 hours ago [-]
"I'm not going to engage with willful ignorance..."
Speaking of which...
pasquinelli 10 hours ago [-]
hamas and hezbollah only exist in response to israeli ethnic cleansing. in light of that the who-started-it question isn't so unclear.
celsoazevedo 10 hours ago [-]
Hezbollah was created in the 80s after the 1982 Lebanon War, when Israel invaded southern Lebanon. But why have they done that? Well, the PLA were attacking them from Lebanon. And then someone will come along to point out that the PLA was attacking Israel because of what Israel did, and someone else will point out that Israel was reacting to the constant ganging up of the arab countries around them, and so on and so forth. Let's not forget the religious side, the cold war politics, etc.
Do you call this clear? I don't.
This mess, for a lack of a better word, was a thing before I was born and I wouldn't be surprised if it still was a thing by the time I'm dead (assuming I live a long life). Every single action has a justification going all the way back.
klipt 10 hours ago [-]
Israel is largely populated by refugees from ethnic cleansing by Arab states. For example the French embassy in Baghdad stands on Jewish land that was stolen by the Iraqi government.
pasquinelli 5 hours ago [-]
famously, jews aren't allowed in baghdad and never have been. and the palestinians today aren't descendants of jews. and the just thing when a people have been wronged is to wrong the descendants of the people who did the wrong thing, because we're cavemen, that's why i support genocide by native americans against everyone else in north and south america, which i'm sure you support as well.
shevy-java 11 hours ago [-]
Well, if you make that distinction then we'd have to go to 1948 or so; or even way before that. But if we keep it on the current timeline then it is true that Israel and the USA attacked Iran not long ago.
If you want to include proxies then you'd have to include all who support the proxies, and also include the USA on the other side, including NATO. So is that the point you wish to make here? China would also have to be included on Iran's side by the way.
> I'm not sure if the "who started the war" question is that clear-cut.
I think it is clear-cut. They refer to Israel and the USA bombing Iran. That's very clear.
If you want to go back to history then we have more actors. But it is clear that they refer to the recent start of the war. Right now the USA is still at war against Iran too; that Israel is permanently at war with Iran is also true.
mcbuilder 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah GP post kinda makes me sick to my stomach, ignoring this historical reality. Much like a lot of Russians would say Ukraine started the war when I distinctly remember the armed forces rushing armored columns of tanks towards Kiev, sending attack helicopters with elite paratroopers on one way missions, and firing barrage after barrage of cruise missiles.
In this case, it's also pretty clear cut. The hostilities happened after we decapitated Iran's regime and started bombing their bases/infrastructure and even a girl's school.
celsoazevedo 10 hours ago [-]
Russia invaded Ukraine. You can point to their "little green men" invading Crimea in 2014, for example.
I don't mean this in a bad way, but your start date for the hostilities is very american-centric. Israel and Iran were attacking each other in 2024 and 2025, for example. The "Twelve-Day War" was in June 2025, but the war only started when the US got involved and hit the girl's school? That doesn't make sense to me.
Hikikomori 9 hours ago [-]
>Israel and Iran were attacking each other in 2024 and 2025
Reality: Multiple surprise attacks launched by Israel, including killing Irans diplomatic negotiators while actively negotiating.
celsoazevedo 9 hours ago [-]
If they were negotiating something, then clearly it didn't start there either. This supports my position that 1) this isn't a simple black and white question and 2) "who started it" depends on the date we decide to pick.
We can argue if it's right to do that while negotiations are going on, but that's a different question.
Hikikomori 8 hours ago [-]
I think it's rather obvious that it didn't start with israel killing negotiators.
celsoazevedo 10 hours ago [-]
> if you make that distinction then we'd have to go to 1948 or so; or even way before that
And that's why I wrote this:
> most will "whatabout" their way through a century of history
Every action is a reply to something, and it keeps going. It never ends. Everyone has a different start date to whatever is happening.
> I think it is clear-cut. They refer to Israel and the USA bombing Iran. That's very clear.
But Israel and Iran were attacking and launching missiles at each other in 2025.
I mean, if one thinks that everything orbits around the US and a war only starts when they get involved, then sure... but there was a war going on before February 2026.
You first need to show that this article is lying or incorrect. Otherwise I can just bring up that same article for every single media artifle ever posted and suggest that because the media was wrong once I can't trust any media.
slowin 12 hours ago [-]
The only source in this article is OpenAI, which has strong Israeli alliances:
What about the editor that ran one of the articles agreeing that he didn't vet it
You still aren't providing any evidence to suggest why the article is invalid.
slowin 12 hours ago [-]
That doesn't mean Iran did it. This whole store is bogus, it's publishing an OpenAI claim as fact with zero push back.
orangedog 12 hours ago [-]
> The campaign placed about 100 fake articles across at least 20 news outlets, the company said.
The entire article is couched in terms like this, showing it's what the company is claiming. How exactly would you push back against internal data a company is using?
Once again, should they just not report on it?
slowin 11 hours ago [-]
No, they shouldn't report on it. Did they ask OpenAI for proof? If so, that's not mentioned in the article. This isn't researched or vetted enough to report.
orangedog 11 hours ago [-]
What proof would be acceptable? That could just as easily be made up.
"Proof" isn't the baseline for reporting on things.
slowin 9 hours ago [-]
Real journalism tries to verify sources. This doesn't even attempt to do that. There's no "the WP couldn't independently verify OpenAI's claim". It's just directly broadcasting what OpenAI says without even attempting to question it. This is not journalism.
DonHopkins 10 hours ago [-]
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roenxi 11 hours ago [-]
You make a sound argument for not trusting the media (more precisely, the New York Times or whoever the editors were for that article). If an institution has an incident where they support batshit crazy claims from the military in support of getting who-knows-how-many people killed it would make sense to stop listening to them on military topics.
orangedog 11 hours ago [-]
WP is not the NYT.
GolfPopper 11 hours ago [-]
>You first need to show that this article is lying or incorrect.
Jeff Bezos quotes Sam Altman. No, no one needs to show anything. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. One billionaire says another billionaire said is not proof and not evidence.
orangedog 11 hours ago [-]
This isn't an extraordinary claim. Iran is at war, they have a propaganda arm, it would be shocking if they weren't doing this.
What exactly would meet your standard of proof?
Once again, they quote an editor of one of the outlets that ran these stories. The entire article falls apart if the fake journalist is actually a real journalist; this makes it very easy to confirm.
GolfPopper 11 hours ago [-]
"It was the Iranians, trust us" is not proof. The pretense that it is, is itself deeply offensive.
The United States government is at war with Iran. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos both have significant interests in pleasing the U.S. government. It would be shocking if they weren't pushing propaganda for the U.S. government.
This isn't news. It's "Iran bad" snarling, badly disguised as journalism.
orangedog 11 hours ago [-]
What would proof look like for you?
I suspect you don't hold other news stories to the same standards We have a claim from a company and the media is reporting on it.
GolfPopper 11 hours ago [-]
>I suspect you don't hold other news stories to the same standards
And I suspect you're engaging in ad hominems. :-)
Trustworthy sources and actual evidence are two things I like before even considering things at face value. This has neither.
11 hours ago [-]
jmyeet 11 hours ago [-]
It's fine to report on it. What's not fine is how the same news organizations that report on it will turn a blind eye to Israel doing the exact same thing, just orders of magnitude bigger.
There are different forms of bias, like active/passive voice, how Palestinians "die" whereas Israelis are "killed" and even multiple instances of Israeli soldiers being "abducted" or even "kidnapped" from a tank. But there's also what media outlets don't report on, such as the use of the Hannibal doctrine on October 7. I can't find a report on this on the NYT. Because there was no independent investigation, it's unclear how many Israelis were killed by the IDF and very little Western reporting on it, such as the eyewitness accounts of Yasmin Porat [1].
Israeli hasbara is pervasive so yes, this is entirely relevant context when there's a report of 100 ChatGPT articles allegedly originating from Iran.
Time to take a look in the mirror. Especially before pointing out biases of others.
ghostDancer 12 hours ago [-]
Trying? Actively doing.
mschuster91 12 hours ago [-]
You don't need propaganda to know that the Iranian Mullahs aren't your friends.
GolfPopper 11 hours ago [-]
I don't need propaganda to know Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and Donald Trump aren't my friends, either. And they're in a much better position to do me harm.
To quote Marine Major General Smedley Butler, War Is A Racket. [1]
> And they're in a much better position to do me harm
Direct harm yes, especially if you're an American. Indirect harm? The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have screwed up shipping toward Europe here for a loooong time.
CommanderData 11 hours ago [-]
Israel literally owns Tiktok and does this every single day legally.
Heck they had YouTube adverts on kids channels after Oct 7th pushing bad Israeli hasbara.
but I believe they are a joint UAE and US company, not Israeli
supjeff 11 hours ago [-]
Looking at today's headlines on Washington Post, I'm asking myself if it's always been a pro-war, pro-trump, right-wing rag, or if it's only since Bezos bought it?
punchmesan 10 hours ago [-]
Only since Bezos. I used to actually pay for WaPo pre-bezos. It was fine for a while and then he started clearly messing with editorial decisions and I bailed. It's now a garbage source.
excannuk 9 hours ago [-]
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tyjen 12 hours ago [-]
Not a bad actor spreading misinformation, but I encountered a similarish weird, dystopian experience with ChatGPT.
Utilized ChatGPT on my PC to search local plant nursery inventories for a specific tree. Output showed several local nurseries with rough probability descriptions regarding whether they have the tree in inventory, except for one nursery. For that nursery, ChatGPT provided a direct link to the specified tree, which was directly on the nursery's domain, showed a picture and description of the tree, and even showed the item in-stock with 6 in inventory at the 5-gallon size.
Excited, I plan my trip and am about to pick up my tree, I then double-check the nursery site on my phone to verify location and stock. As I attempted to navigate the website inventory to find the tree, I noticed that the tree no longer existed. There is no page for that varietal or species of tree on the entire website's domain.
I head back inside and look at the ChatGPT provided link on the PC and there it is, showing the inventory that doesn't show up when you use the nursery's website to directly find it without the provided link. A call to the nursery, further verified that the tree is not in stock, nor have they ever carried it.
ChatGPT made it all up. Did ChatGPT decide to do this, or did the nursery pay for this type of "advertising" to generate in-person customers? Nevertheless, still an incredibly weird and dystopian experience.
garyfirestorm 12 hours ago [-]
It didn’t generate a link (sources) when it claimed it was in stock
ButlerianJihad 12 hours ago [-]
Did you consider that the website made it up and fed it to ChatGPT?
It sounds like a bundle of very common SEO tricks combined with the differential between your human user agent’s visit.
Perhaps ChatGPT only showed you what the nursery told it about.
This phenomenon is not unique to LLM. If you telephone a store, chances are that the salesman who answers the phone will tell you only what you want to hear. They don’t even strictly need to lie. The store only wins if you drive there and walk in the door. Why should they discourage you from doing that very thing?
This concept was driven home to me at the dry cleaners. Why should a dry cleaner stop work and answer the phone, only to tell a customer that their batch isn’t ready? They just got taken off-task for a non-revenue interaction. It doesn’t matter, because even if the customer’s batch is ready, they aren’t there to pay and pick it up!
mrguyorama 7 hours ago [-]
There is no measurable difference between a neural network generating text that happens to be true and a neural network generating text that happens to be false.
It's not "Hallucination" or a conspiracy, it is their defined operating mode.
It told you they had that tree because you wanted that tree, and because it was trained to tell you what you want to hear. By design.
pmontra 12 hours ago [-]
It seems that it generated a page with a plausible answer for a very long tail subject for which the random part of the generation could become prominent. We used to say that it hallucinated the answer. Another term is confabulation.
If only the nursery had a MCP server /s
Avicebron 12 hours ago [-]
Not being able to trust your tools is certainly dystopian...
Sock puppet accounts and fake opinion pieces are nothing new.
The new thing is a super centralized "tool" that besides doing your writing for you, logs everything, judges it, and reports to authorities and news outlets as it sees fit.
The other thing that's new (and more structurally relevant, since obviously not all LLMs do what you describe) is the dramatic reduction in cost affiliated with this strategy.
It's (literally) unbelievable that this many allegedly sophisticated people on HN have no concept of cost and what dramatic cost reductions can achieve.
There's new socio economic groups that are "profitable" to target with phishing attacks, because LLMs made it cheaper in 2024-25.
Assuming you’re taking about Tumbler Ridge due to the new FBI charges…
Nearly every article I saw about the new FBI charges mentioned the shooter and collaborator being trans.
Then it took me 2 seconds to find the NYT article from the week of the shooting which also mentions the shooter being trans. Obviously all the right wing outlets mentioned it… so what are you on about?
I’m with you on the point about putting state media out there to let people make their own decisions, but you lost the plot with the trans conspiracy theory nonsense
https://archive.is/6Us4N
Perhaps the real problem is too much acceptance of shoddy verification.
"Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda."
in 2024.. hopefully filters when training have gotten better, but maybe not..
Reminder that an intelligent entity does not believe or repeat something it has read even a million times: reminder that now that LLMs exist, we must find the real recipe ASAP.
Of course there can be more examples of intellectual failures than of intellectual accomplished ones. And again, this calls for the urgency of finally injecting supplies of intelligence into the systems.
Remember, the discussion upthread was about Russian propaganda making its way into AI models. Similarly, my point was about Soviet propaganda making its way into the training materials for academics, journalists, etc. I didn't say they were actual Soviets.
There are easier explanations. A hundred people are checking and occasionally the page, with new posts added every couple of minutes: clearly some will meet a post at "0 minutes", read it as fresh, and possibly react. I have seen it.
This regime and its enablers have done more quantifiable harm to more people and institutions in America than anything Russia has, and one of its favorite tools is propaganda.
Also AI companies: oh no, You’ve poisoned our models with your data!
As disturbing as "you would not steal a <whatever>" in the times of pro-copyright brainwashing. What is published is there for people to read, and most societies already decided through libraries: for free, with charges on the State.
> [all caps]
Pls reread the guidelines. Check the page visually, see why. Edit the post pls. while you can.
My understanding is that this is the way France operates where you assume all the media is hostile and you view it all critically. In America this is a bit of a shock because for a long time we had trusted arbiters of truth and now that they are less trusted we've been trying to look for alternatives rather realizing it should all be examined critically.
Could we keep that wording for other news? If not, could we then say here that ChatGPT planted fake articles, for consistency?
I thought I remembered it being called "submarining" but that seems to be something else. I also thought I remembered Joel Spolsky writing about it but can't find it now.
Other than those, it was literally Medium and social media.
What you can do is write a polished opinion piece and tell one of your assets, or pay some politician, to publish it as an OpEd in outlets like the WaPo and NYT. Or you can get nobodies who know nothing to publish similar articles to each other in Wired, the International Business Times, and Forbes (either by "leaking" to them or because they're on your payroll), then get politicians to mention those articles in Congress and to write furious letters to WaPo and NYT accusing them of covering this story up - and then they'll write your propaganda themselves.
I don't really know what the best approach is to it, but I don't think a simple hands off, engage with the argument as such, is a winning strategy. I don't really like the alternatives any better.
All I can say is that this highlights the need for open weights models.
> OpenAI said it had banned the accounts behind the campaign
If we knew OpenAI would always ban such activity regardless of the actor, I'd be happy. I don't know this.
Propaganda has always been there. The dynamics that allowed for all the fake news articles in 2016 to impact the elections are the same dynamics that allowed the articles in this case (shoddy news editors who aren't even verifying the identity of the authors). We didn't solve the original problem in the decade since - it's not going to be solved and is here to stay. The issue has shifted to who has access to this power.
Some random perspective: For years, I lived in an autocratic country where there was no freedom of speech and the government closely monitored all news agencies/publications in the country (before most people had Internet access). The dialog/debate was the same: "If we give freedom of expression, how will we address all the false propaganda coming in?"
Of course, times changed. They couldn't block the whole Internet, and false propaganda came in. Which version would you prefer - the one where they blocked it (but ran their own propaganda), or the one where they couldn't block it?
The notion we only see this news when it is calling out a country with which the federal government is in conflict makes me question to veracity and intent of the article itself, more than the content of it.
Thats true.
But this article is about the influence campaigns presumably tun by the Iranian government.
It’s designed to make the reader question which articles they have read recently that are Iranian propaganda, and sow doubt about future articles that seem to benefit Iran.
This amount of FUD always seems to increase around election time…
A big part of the problem is social networks treating very non authoritative sources as if they are authoritative based on all sorts of factors that can be manipulated or based on financial gain (somebody pais to get their content promoted).
Users of these tools include lobby groups, nation states, politicians, criminals, scammers, etc. Anyone interested in promoting their cause, sowing FUD about other people's causes, spreading misinformation, or distracting from inconvenient but accurate information.
We'll always have people like that. But we might want to think about getting better tools to deal with them. I prefer getting my news from reputable sources instead of random clickbait distributors or whatever. Keeping track of reputation for domains, people, etc. is currently hard. I don't think it's necessarily a technical problems. We've had the tools to digitally sign stuff for decades. But we're not using them effectively. People can't be bothered to sign their emails, documents, photos, articles, etc. The tools to add and check those signatures are not there or an afterthought at best.
That low?
In all honesty, given the volume of comments, posts and articles that bots can generate in a given time period? I mean it’s gotta be several orders of magnitude higher than what humans can generate.
And then you factor in the fact that even most of the humans are astroturfing..
The percentage of influence campaigns we interact with has just gotta be really high.
It's like when SEA starts to distance itself from US's grip, we suddenly hear about North Korea doing missile tests
* Opinions opposed to US administration policy on AI (including data centers) is called Chinese propaganda. A month or two ago, when someone tried to roll out a bunch of pro-data center opinions across the media (coincidentally all on the same day making similar arguments), they included this theme.
* Opinions opposed to US administration policy on Iran is called Iranian propaganda.
That's not really new: News reporting and opinions critical of the US administration have lead to the authors being called traitors, 'enemies of the people', and sometimes being prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Some leaders in the defense industry call critics of military spending and pro-warfare policies, 'traitors', etc.
Of course some could be, might be, likely is true. That's the nature of effective propaganda.
(A side effect of nationalism - 'nation uber alles', defining nation as 'what I believe' - is that individuals and freedom are relegated to second place or lower.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=slowin
I don't know why you brought comments into it, the most common reading of "posts" is "submissions", not "submissions and comments".
There is an ENORMOUS "defend Israel online" industry, usually using all Jewish people as human shields for the middle eastern regime. Emissary, RiseApp, Report It, to name a few.
The relevant question is how some skew the private mass media here.
It's not whataboutism, unless somehow Pearl Harbor is whataboutism to Nuking Hiroshima. Sometimes things have direct cause and effect, even if it's inconvenient to your argument.
Wouldn't that technically be a whataboutism? As far as I've seen it used, "whataboutism" usually means that there is a cause and effect that is inconvenient to someone's argument. Whatever a whataboutism is in the popular parlance, it isn't a logical or factual error.
Anyway, the key point here is it'd be really helpful to understand exactly what magic the Israelis used to get the US into this war. It has to be the most bizarre promise-not-kept of any US president in decades. Nobody seriously thought this sort of escapade could end well and although Trump is pretty vague he seemed clear enough in understanding that lying the US public into wars was a legacy killer. It looks like it'll re-cripple the Republicans in the same way the last Bush administration did.
Trump is extremely easy to manipulate. Tell Trump that his legacy will be great and he will listen to you over all of his advisors (NSA, CIA, etc. etc.). The intelligence agencies are useless because the narcissist only cares about himself.
It's been the same thing with every foreign affairs issue for over a decade now. Trump just agrees with the people who butter him up.
Epstein blackmail, that’s been pretty obvious no?
I usually avoid these discussions because I struggle to see good sides in the conflict (maybe the children?) and most will "whatabout" their way through a century of history...
... but with proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas (and affiliated), Houthis, etc, funded and armed by Iran, I'm not sure if the "who started the war" question is that clear-cut.
Incidentally, Israel's relationship with Iran was surprisingly good before the Revolution.
I'm not going to defend religious fanatics of any kind, especially when there are way too many on both sides that would wipe the other side if they had their way (as seen in the last 100 years of the region), but I think anyone with a very black and white view of the situation doesn't fully understand it.
According to Iran, the proxies are part of their forward defence strategy. Maybe you think that's needed, but that's not what I'm arguing.
Unless you consider that attacking a country known for strong reactions (and over-reactions) is a good strategy for those on the receiving end of said reaction, you can't think of the proxies as organizations that exist to protect the poor civilians.
Speaking of which...
Do you call this clear? I don't.
This mess, for a lack of a better word, was a thing before I was born and I wouldn't be surprised if it still was a thing by the time I'm dead (assuming I live a long life). Every single action has a justification going all the way back.
If you want to include proxies then you'd have to include all who support the proxies, and also include the USA on the other side, including NATO. So is that the point you wish to make here? China would also have to be included on Iran's side by the way.
> I'm not sure if the "who started the war" question is that clear-cut.
I think it is clear-cut. They refer to Israel and the USA bombing Iran. That's very clear.
If you want to go back to history then we have more actors. But it is clear that they refer to the recent start of the war. Right now the USA is still at war against Iran too; that Israel is permanently at war with Iran is also true.
In this case, it's also pretty clear cut. The hostilities happened after we decapitated Iran's regime and started bombing their bases/infrastructure and even a girl's school.
I don't mean this in a bad way, but your start date for the hostilities is very american-centric. Israel and Iran were attacking each other in 2024 and 2025, for example. The "Twelve-Day War" was in June 2025, but the war only started when the US got involved and hit the girl's school? That doesn't make sense to me.
Reality: Multiple surprise attacks launched by Israel, including killing Irans diplomatic negotiators while actively negotiating.
We can argue if it's right to do that while negotiations are going on, but that's a different question.
And that's why I wrote this:
> most will "whatabout" their way through a century of history
Every action is a reply to something, and it keeps going. It never ends. Everyone has a different start date to whatever is happening.
> I think it is clear-cut. They refer to Israel and the USA bombing Iran. That's very clear.
But Israel and Iran were attacking and launching missiles at each other in 2025.
I mean, if one thinks that everything orbits around the US and a war only starts when they get involved, then sure... but there was a war going on before February 2026.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-new-york-times-wmd-cov...
https://x.com/StopArabHate/status/1806450091399745608
It's not credible.
You still aren't providing any evidence to suggest why the article is invalid.
The entire article is couched in terms like this, showing it's what the company is claiming. How exactly would you push back against internal data a company is using?
Once again, should they just not report on it?
"Proof" isn't the baseline for reporting on things.
Jeff Bezos quotes Sam Altman. No, no one needs to show anything. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. One billionaire says another billionaire said is not proof and not evidence.
What exactly would meet your standard of proof?
Once again, they quote an editor of one of the outlets that ran these stories. The entire article falls apart if the fake journalist is actually a real journalist; this makes it very easy to confirm.
The United States government is at war with Iran. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos both have significant interests in pleasing the U.S. government. It would be shocking if they weren't pushing propaganda for the U.S. government.
This isn't news. It's "Iran bad" snarling, badly disguised as journalism.
I suspect you don't hold other news stories to the same standards We have a claim from a company and the media is reporting on it.
And I suspect you're engaging in ad hominems. :-)
Trustworthy sources and actual evidence are two things I like before even considering things at face value. This has neither.
There are different forms of bias, like active/passive voice, how Palestinians "die" whereas Israelis are "killed" and even multiple instances of Israeli soldiers being "abducted" or even "kidnapped" from a tank. But there's also what media outlets don't report on, such as the use of the Hannibal doctrine on October 7. I can't find a report on this on the NYT. Because there was no independent investigation, it's unclear how many Israelis were killed by the IDF and very little Western reporting on it, such as the eyewitness accounts of Yasmin Porat [1].
Israeli hasbara is pervasive so yes, this is entirely relevant context when there's a report of 100 ChatGPT articles allegedly originating from Iran.
[1]: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-06/ty-article/.p...
To quote Marine Major General Smedley Butler, War Is A Racket. [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
Direct harm yes, especially if you're an American. Indirect harm? The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have screwed up shipping toward Europe here for a loooong time.
Heck they had YouTube adverts on kids channels after Oct 7th pushing bad Israeli hasbara.
How exactly is ByteDance an Israeli company?
but I believe they are a joint UAE and US company, not Israeli
Utilized ChatGPT on my PC to search local plant nursery inventories for a specific tree. Output showed several local nurseries with rough probability descriptions regarding whether they have the tree in inventory, except for one nursery. For that nursery, ChatGPT provided a direct link to the specified tree, which was directly on the nursery's domain, showed a picture and description of the tree, and even showed the item in-stock with 6 in inventory at the 5-gallon size.
Excited, I plan my trip and am about to pick up my tree, I then double-check the nursery site on my phone to verify location and stock. As I attempted to navigate the website inventory to find the tree, I noticed that the tree no longer existed. There is no page for that varietal or species of tree on the entire website's domain.
I head back inside and look at the ChatGPT provided link on the PC and there it is, showing the inventory that doesn't show up when you use the nursery's website to directly find it without the provided link. A call to the nursery, further verified that the tree is not in stock, nor have they ever carried it.
ChatGPT made it all up. Did ChatGPT decide to do this, or did the nursery pay for this type of "advertising" to generate in-person customers? Nevertheless, still an incredibly weird and dystopian experience.
It sounds like a bundle of very common SEO tricks combined with the differential between your human user agent’s visit.
Perhaps ChatGPT only showed you what the nursery told it about.
This phenomenon is not unique to LLM. If you telephone a store, chances are that the salesman who answers the phone will tell you only what you want to hear. They don’t even strictly need to lie. The store only wins if you drive there and walk in the door. Why should they discourage you from doing that very thing?
This concept was driven home to me at the dry cleaners. Why should a dry cleaner stop work and answer the phone, only to tell a customer that their batch isn’t ready? They just got taken off-task for a non-revenue interaction. It doesn’t matter, because even if the customer’s batch is ready, they aren’t there to pay and pick it up!
It's not "Hallucination" or a conspiracy, it is their defined operating mode.
It told you they had that tree because you wanted that tree, and because it was trained to tell you what you want to hear. By design.
If only the nursery had a MCP server /s