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- Hacker News
- I have an unusual name, and have published a book with some minor fame (which is the first google result for my name). Querying ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, etc. gives a reasonably accurate summary of my public info.
OTOH, this tool describes me as a "security researcher known for talks and writing on JavaScript, Node.js, and web security."
I am not a security researcher and have never given any such talk and know precious little about Node.js or web security.
by bananamogul - Apparently I'm an American volcanologist. Pretty cool.
(I nuke my online accounts regularly to not be tracked - started because I had a stalker but now it's just for the best. I know that this goes against hn rules but yeah it's a bad rule)
by comrade1234 - Apparently according to Gemini, I, the only person in the world with my name (unique first name + long complex last name) am a professional soccer player.
Yeah, be careful with answers you get from AIs.
by keiferski - Me too: must be World Cup themed.by uberex
- Well, have you ever tried to go pro? Maybe you shouldby kristopolous
- I, also with an internationally unique name, am a Canadian entrepreneur and a professional rugby player.by x3n0ph3n3
- Yep apparently I am a German author, I am not. Further searching and I could not find anyone else with my name.by HerbManic
- Likewise, unique name, is mostly wring about me, thinks I’m a French politician and hallucinates that I’m an actor (my sister is).by iamacyborg
- Yeah, I’m an actor who has been in game of thrones and the Alien franchise, apparently - but no such actor exists. There are only three findable folks with my name - one’s a felon, one’s been dead a couple years, one’s me.
Oh and sometimes I’m a dog food brand. Go figure.
by madaxe_again - I'm apparently a former professional soccer player too, but I can't find my alter-ego anywhere using the classic search engines.
Interestingly, the only other person with my (very french) first name and (very spanish) surname is also a software engineer, but in Côte d'Ivoire. What were the odds?
by lbreakjai - I'm seeing a lot of people report that they're football players and / or actors. Must be a common hallucination.by Cthulhu_
- This is a clever trick to get you to enter your real name. ;-) I entered mine, I was on the page kind of, there was some kind of exaggeration of me as the last one. I was surprised someone else in my family who is a kind of actual famous person was not found. It seems to have a lot of recency bias based on that.
- "which historical portrait do you most resemble?"
proceeds to get rubes to upload all of their faces in portrait for data mining.
- My user name here is in the weights. My real name isn't on the Internet.
Oddly, I'm listed only as a stack-exchange contributor, which was really brief compared to hn but its adjacent enough the relations might run together.
by joe_the_user - I was thinking something like this two weeks ago in another thread[1]
>my Reddit history is part of every training set. It was taken without my consent. So now I'm immortal in a way, and hiding in the weights
Anyway 654 isn't horrible for the history still tied to me. That's in the top 6%[2]. It's interesting that it's non-deterministic, and the more keywords you add about yourself, the higher your score goes.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403669
[2] https://www.intheweights.com/p/michael-mike-warot-ka9dgx-mrg...
by mikewarot - The.. false positives are extremely scary (not listed as hallucinations)
A terrorist on the US saction list.. the first female airplane suicide bomber?? I was in the US a year ago and I did not bomb any planes
I think with Arabic names it's highly biased, which is kind of scary, I don't want to be bombed based on an LLM query
by amdivia - I have bad news for you about what the US military does with bombs and LLMs:
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion-features/claude-ai-...
by reverius42 - Apparently I'm either a child voice actor on the cartoon Bluey or an adult film actor. Those were the most interesting anyway. But all of them were hallucinations. The most interesting thing about this, IMO is that none of the models could simply say that they didn't recognize the name.by esperent
- 740, top 5%. Awesome.
https://www.intheweights.com/p/jeremy-edberg-reddit-netflix
Interestingly, almost all of them got it right (although one seems to think I was a VP at Datadog, and I've seen that error before in some LLMs). But Haiku just says "no one of that name seems to exist". So Haiku must be pretty pruned down.
by jedberg - I’m a hallucination. None of these are me.
Perhaps the closest is DeepSeek v4:
> Hyperpape is a user on the LessWrong forum, known for thoughtful comments on rationality and philosophy.
I studied philosophy, so maybe, except I don't post on LessWrong, and I'm not a rationalist.
by hyperpape - You can be in the weights if you make those things true.by AgentME
- Ha ha! Yes I am in the weights apparently. Nearly all the models know what I do.
I suspect being in the Open Source world is a bit of a bubble as far as the weights are concerned.
Anyway it stroked my ego nicely even though it was totally artificial, like Zaphod Beeblebrox surviving the Total Perspective Vortex.
by nickcw - Always happy to see a Hitchhikers guide comment.by brianjking
- > Zaphod Beeblebrox
> Fictional two-headed ex-President of the Galaxy
> 979 strength
by Cthulhu_ - Yeah, that went about as well as I would have expected.
It dug up a bunch of what can only be my information, then made up a bunch of confidently wrong things to say about me.
I'm a Software Engineer and SaaS guy, known for running the company "[random word from my blog] Software" and his [different word from my blog] Blog. Founder of three separate startups I've never heard of and may not exist, and well known contributor to Open Source (because that's something that software people often do, so it makes for pretty words to put into a paragraph, despite me not contributing to open source).
Overall, it's like watching a really bad sight reader doing his act. It suggests something that's likely true about you given your background, then keeps tweaking those suggestions until you go "yeah, that's it! you nailed me!".
Sadly, this is pretty par for the course watching AI try to do stuff.
by jasonkester - I don't know what people expect. If you ask a random person to recall anyone they've ever known, you're going to get a lot of "don't they have a blog called <random word> software? And maybe they're into photography too?". That's just how information works.
The only difference with an LLM is that it won't say "maybe".
by stavros - > Overall, it's like watching a really bad sight reader doing his act.
After a few clear fabrications, in the hallucinations it suggests I might be "a private individual" about who there's not much information.
I mean, I guess oh my gosh that's me but...
by genezeta - I have a last name that only my family holds in Denmark (which means me and my brother by now), yet it managed to tag me a Professional Football Player, MP for the Socialist Party and Founder of a Sleep Mattress Company.
I do like the visuals though.
by Stromgren - Mine got me 100% wrong. I recognise some of the information as that of some people with the same surname as me though
I thought it would've just had the information from my linkedin
by ChrisRR - I think it failing miserably to make an accurate profile just with generic training data is a good thing. Identifying someone with precision should require a minimum of intent, if not effort.by ouraf