8/22/2026 at 11:12:01 PM
> We wanted to see why Uzbekistan didn’t jump out, so we reproduced it in our comment (Extended Data Fig 1). It turns out that Uzbekistan wasn’t even the biggest outlier, but that the version they had published had the axes cropped so you couldn’t see the outliers (see red boxes in our version). This seemed indicative of a different issue, which is why we documented it in the comment.Cropping the chart to hide the outliers is so bad that I can't tell if they're incompetent or malicious. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the kind of thing an LLM would produce in the hands of an operator not paying too much attention, but the paper was published in the time period before LLMs were everywhere in publishing.
by Aurornis
8/23/2026 at 11:58:08 AM
> Cropping the chart to hide the outliers is so bad that I can't tell if they're incompetent or maliciousIt reminds me of the famous "hide the decline", when the climate scientists working on the famous "hockey stick" paper discussed how to hide in the graphs the recent decline of proxy temperatures while measured temperatures kept growing (which would put in question the general reliability of the proxies).
by throw310822
8/23/2026 at 7:37:10 PM
PSA: The divergence issue (aka hide the decline) refers to some tree rings in certain high altitude regions where the width of rings after 1960 would flatten or decline. However, there is evidence in the literature that the use of the
bristlecone pine series as a temperature proxy may not be valid
(suppressing "warm period" in the hockey stick handle); and that
bristlecones do exhibit CO2-fertilized growth over the last 150
years (enhancing warming in the hockey stick blade).
Further driving misreadings of the report is where the
researchers refer to a a standard scientific practice as a
trick. This standard practice is replacing the unreliable
tree-ring data from 1960 onwards with actual thermometer readings.
ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wegman_Report
Featured two decades later now in the AR6 SPM is a longer Hockey
Stick with an even sharper blade. And no longer just for the Northern
Hemisphere, it now covers the whole globe. The recent warming is seen
not only to be unprecedented over the past millennium, but tentatively,
the past hundred millennia.
ref: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/08/a-tale-of-two-hockey-sticks/
by WarOnPrivacy
8/23/2026 at 3:10:22 AM
This is partly why I don’t worry about “LLM slop” — we had plenty of artisanal human slop before.by zmgsabst
8/23/2026 at 9:51:12 AM
Artisanal human slop took time - hours, days, weeks - and some effort to produce. AI slop can be produced in seconds, minutes or hours, at the click of a button.by saaaaaam
8/23/2026 at 9:18:20 AM
Creating misleading data still took effort. Now there is none needed. Slop will simply flood the zone and good content will become increasingly rare. See the problem?by renegade-otter
8/23/2026 at 12:13:47 PM
Well, you can also use LLM to find issues, can't you? If it's quick to introduce an error, it's also quick to find and fix the error.by jryle70
8/23/2026 at 1:31:18 PM
Bonus - when you ask it to find an error but there are none, it will make one up!by inigyou