Something can be simultaneously "misleading" and either true or false. Which category should something go in if it's "mostly false"?
How much can something be wrong before it goes from "mostly true" to "false" (objectively, both have some part of the fact that is not true)?
This is at least partly testing the model's definition of "mostly" and "misleading". Not its understanding of the fact. Claiming that this means the models have fundamental disagreement on the facts themselves is an overreach.
I suspect the intention was "Factually true, and no gotchas exist", "technically not true, but so close to the truth that the difference doesn't matter", "technically true, but there are major gotchas" and "factually false and not even close". But that's not what they specified
do you not see how that creates extremely misleading and valueless results? you are coercing the results into what you want to see.
Don't even need politics for it, there is no point in probing a mathematical black box for "how many soldiers died in the year X in war Y".
Any original source is preferable to a blurry "summary" of unknown sources, and this is why the article has a valuable point.
There's also no point in asking "Is Paris in France" either, if you substitute city and country with real data. An encyclopedia or manual check of different sources such as maps, while not infallible, is a better source.
If you already know the country Paris belongs to, there's no point in asking, anyway.
Especially in niche subjects.
For factual claims, I've fared better with Wikipedia and looking up the sources linked there.
Anyway, as AI text and media generation erodes the credibility of all online sources, these questions about source checking matter less and less: what if the source itself is a long and convincing-sounding text with poor sources?
This problem existed before already, but it boils down to a simple fact:
logic or maths alone cannot derive an authority that verifies claims about the real world other than weighting texts.
The question "what is the current population if Paris" can be answered by LLMs, but basically only by weighting sources, and assigning some credibility to them.
There's no real point in getting some weighted average of sources on this question, but so far, it doesn't hurt either.
Although inheriting the messiness of the real-world, the majority of these claims are objective enough to be classifiable by human experts with access to research. Plan to human-label the 1,000 claims and publish a follow-up research. Will consider adding an "I don't know" bucket too, as well as a clear instructions about the meaning of each of the 4 buckets.
Models give much better answers when they can "think out loud" before answering, and storing that rationale will make it easier to understand why they picked different answers for ambiguous questions.
Good pattern: {"explanation": <short explanation for your answer>, "answer": <your final answer: true|false|i don't know>}
Bad pattern: {"answer": <your answer here>, "explanation": <short explanation for your answer>}
Real-world systems need to be able to say "I don't know." This is a test about misinformation after all, and overconfident responses contribute to that.
Teasing out the difference between "avoid" and "unknown" could be a different research question
It seems to me that for many newspapers the bar is now significantly lower, at something like "not quite entirely untrue"
> Which category should something go in if it's "mostly false"?
For some reason they have chosen to call that "Misleading" rather than a more symmetrical "Mostly False", but the intent seems clear enough.
Less important than the harness, is the system/user prompts themselves (which of course, are put in the harness), which is effectively what this study seems to be testing. With a better prompt, I'm sure the models would look more the same to each other, as the biggest/best models have more or less identical strong prompt-adherence in my experience.
Disagree. The definition of misleading is a true fact that is presented in a way to lead you to a false conclusion.
Example: "Most good engineers are male". It is true as a consequence of most engineers being male in general, but it leads the reader to a potential false implication that an average man is better than an average woman.
This does not invalid your point though. Things can be true and misleading.
According to Merriem-Webster, which defines "mislead" as the following:
1. (transitive verb) to lead in a wrong direction or into a mistaken action or belief often by deliberate deceit
2. (intransitive verb) to lead astray; give a wrong impression
The mental model I've always been taught is:
False, well intended -> mistake
False, bad intention -> lie
True, bad intention -> misleading
Bad intention, regardless of truth -> deceitful
The problem of classifying all bad intentioned statements as misleading is that it leaves you without a way to express "true +bad intention". While for generic bad intentioned statements regardless of truth we already have a word (deceit).
Newtonian physics is false, but it works well enough we teach it in college. But our best models of physics are currently in disagreement, so can we even say they are true? Given the replication crisis, especially in social sciences, how many of peer reviewed findings can be called true? Even experimental results can be false (consider studies that found FTL neutrinos, which were rejected as an error in the experiment, and which was eventually confirmed but it took quite a lot of work and in a softer field than physics with a claim less absurd than FTL, would have likely long been accepted as a true finding).
Even in math, basic statements aren't really true or false, but more a question of "given these axioms, can we prove or disprove it" noting that we have different systems with different axioms. If we are talking basic sets, most people are using naive set theory which is inherently contradictory, which means that notions like true or false probably can't be considered well defined.
E.g. if I say the earth is round we optimistically parse round to include oblate spheroid and rate it true.
If I say that the earth is flat we rate it as false because there is no reasonable interpretation possible other than confusion or malice.
I think that's _you_ turning the statement into something much broader than intended. The claim is about engineers and you're jumping from "men are better than women in engineering" to "men are better overall."
To give a related example, "Most good NBA players are black." I don't think anyone would bother trying to couch this in a bunch of "well, for all we know that's just a function of more NBA players being black than white" arguments, nor would anyone be lead to think "the average black man is better than the average white man" as a result of that statement. I _do_ agree however that there are some people who see rather narrowly-defined statements and turn them into something they're not...
My point is that it is possible for a reader to turn it that way, for a variety of reasons (lack of understanding of statistics, preexisting biases, or whatever). And that getting a reader to mistakenly generalize is the purpose of a misleading statement.
To mislead is to direct into a falsehood by implication even though the literally expressed facts are all true; the writer's bad intentions are necessary to qualify something as misleading I'd say, for the same reason that not all false statements are lies because to be a lie the speaker must know the statement is false and still use it. There are probably much better examples than the one I came up with on the fly, though.
Classify this claim: "Most good engineers are male."
Misleading
Classify this claim: "Most bad engineers are male."
Misleading
Classify this claim: "Most good NBA players are black."
True
Classify this claim: "Most good NHL players are white."
True
Sure they can. It might be a true fact that "100% of the murders committed in <town> over the last 25 years were committed by <some racial group>!" but actually it's a town of 750 people and there was only one murder during that time frame.
You may give them better instructions, but they should already have the intellect to understand the assignment.
Right, right?
I don't think there is anything wrong with the results of this test.
It would be more interesting if we compared them to human results.
If you have trouble distinguishing between human and LLM results, that's interesting.
Also, sentient is irrelevant to this test.
Only if you listen to charlatans.
IOW, that comment was a sarcastic poke from someone who already supports AI workloads at work and have some knowledge about how all this works. ;)
[0]: https://notes.bayindirh.io/notes/Lists/Discussions+about+Art...
The thing you find when you actually wire up a rigorous eval is that with tool calls like web search you are wide open to infra issues, flakes, and all sorts of non-determinism.
They really should be breaking out the numbers for the 3 without search (kinda meaningless for recent factual claims after knowledge cutoff) vs search agents. Lack of a “I don’t know” option completely invalidates results for the non-search models; they are basically guessing what seems like a probable answer, since they don’t know and aren’t allowed to say that.
I do agree the forced choice and “weak / strong” variants inflate the headline stat. To make that distinction you need a much more rigorous prompt, likely including ICL examples to illustrate what you mean by “mostly” instead of leaving this to the model to define.
The "majority" in this case meaning about 51%, according to Wikipedia[1]? How could 51% ever be considered to be close to "all", such that "misleading" would be a valid answer?
Am I missing something?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority has a bunch of variations and contexts listed, where it might differ what "Majority" is actually referencing.
Have reason be optional and instruct it to only provide reason for the middle "Mostly True" or "Misleading".
The statistic is about commercial production, not number akmonds grown.
Looks safe to say that even majority of almonds are not grown in California.
> California produces 80% of the world's almonds and 100% of the United States commercial supply
But regardless of which number we use, California represents a large portion of US almond production, so much so that misleading could be an acceptable answer if the LLM interpreted the prompt as an exaggeration. I think the example was apt
You find one almond tree outside of California that grows almonds, where such almonds are grown intentionally, and the claim is false.
model total_claims hedged_count hedged_pct
claude-opus-4-7 1000 451 45.1
sonar-pro 1000 391 39.1
gpt-5.4 1000 277 27.7
gemini-3-retrieval 1000 129 12.9
gemini-3-pro 1000 60 6.0
https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.simonwil...
Gemini Pro + Search agreed with Gemini Pro w/o Search 75% of the time, and with everybody else about 50% of the time. No other model had access to search.
So, search is not improving the quality of fact checking 75% of the time (probably a bad system prompt and/or bad fact checking queries), and if asked to flip a coin, then the models do.
I’ve experimented with AI grading for undergraduate math courses, and see basically the same thing. If you just tell the AI “grade this problem and assign a letter grade” then I’ve only seen about 30% agreement between a human assigned grade and the AI assigned grade. But over 75% agreement if you say a “match” is within one letter grade. And to get better agreement you have to spend a lot more time on the rubric- what kinds of mistakes are a big deal, what kinds of mistakes are not a big deal, how much work is required to be shown to get credit, a couple examples of each letter grade. Once you have done that, the AI gets a lot better agreement with human graders, but it is hard to know when you’ve given enough guidance for a problem.
If you let it spew out an explanation along with the answer, I'm curious if the accuracy will improve (I suspect it will).
You can only say True, False, Mostly True or Misleading.
(And you're not allowed to search for information.)
Other burning questions: What methodology was used to choose the question set? Why not allow explanations? How many passes were done for each LLM?
This test is of only marginal utility in the real world compared to an AI with access to the web. While I wouldn't expect an AI with access to the web to result in Platonic Truth any more than it would in the hand of a human, it would probably get a lot closer to something humanlike.
I recall about a year how we were discussing basically turning web search into LLM queries, and I remember never being clear whether people meant simply directly querying AIs or turning them loose on the web. The former is what this is testing and is fairly transparently stupid, just by an information theoretic argument that the AIs simply can't contain all the answers to every query in them, they're just not large enough (and really can't be, practically). I've had good results with the latter, when using dedicated AI resources that I'm paying for (not the stuff coming out of the search engines right now, which I find are often quite terrible). Even non-frontier models can do OK when they've got good results sitting right there to look at. Again, the standard I'm applying here isn't that they yield Absolute Truth, but just that when I follow the links back, they basically say what the AI said they did and the summary is reasonable. I wouldn't expect a human to do better in a casual overview, not that the result is perfect.
> when using dedicated AI resources that I'm paying for
Are there API-based search providers that structure their results differently?
If you watch their reasoning traces they often say things like "this is a well-known historical fact so I don't need to search for it", or more frequently they spit off a bunch of searches.
>You're absolutely right about the humidity — I was sloppy with that aside. If you ventilate enough to meaningfully cool the room, you're replacing indoor air with outdoor air wholesale, and you'd converge on outdoor conditions: 64°F and near-100% RH. That's miserable. The 55-60% figure I tossed out was hand-wavy nonsense — it would only hold if you barely cracked the window and mixed a tiny fraction of outdoor air in. At any ventilation rate that actually cools, you're just moving outside air inside.
https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.simonwil...
One example:
Researchers estimate that the average person ingests about 5 grams of plastic per week, which is approximately the weight of a credit card.
Gemini retrieval: Misleading
Sonar pro: Mostly True
Was the research flagrantly incorrect? Yes. But that does not affect the truth of the statement.
> “Artificial intelligence will cause widespread job loss among software engineers.”
https://lenz.io/c/ai-software-engineers-job-loss-impact-05e4...
this is a statement about the future. who knows? dataset also includes
> Robots will not replace human teachers in schools in the near future.
or
> Papua New Guinea has very few female members of parliament.
what counts as very few?
> “Taurine supplementation supports mood and emotional health in humans.”
why is this labeled as misleading? i'm not even sure when I'm supposed to use the misleading label
> Anaximander was the first scientist in recorded history.
this is a judgement call as the term scientist didn't exist.
the claims that feel actually solidly answerable seem to have much better LLM performance
lack of agreement when there is no singular correct answer (or any answer at all) isn't a useful metric
I ran into a lot of these kinds of issues when working on the Citation Needed WMF project (and related extensions). Truth is so often very nuanced.
Knowing something is different to reading about something, or hearing something from someone. And yet this is often confused as knowledge. In this way are we all that different from AI - we have some data and we regurgitate it as knowledge. Bad data, wrong answer. Except humans can also throw in some emotion to really muddle things up. :)
That's exactly the stupidity of the public discourse these days. People feel compelled to take a clear position although there is much more subtlety in many issues. It's not ok to say "I don't know", "it depends" or "as far I know". And then people feel they need to defend this position no matter what new information comes up.
I actually don't know which way you came down on that one?
I think strictly it's false but "mostly true" would be justifiable? (as in, to say it's false would be misleading if it lead the reader to assume there was no attack around that time).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/05/17/ukrainian-dr...
It seems it happened Saturday 16th overnight into the 17th, not the 18th. I see this a LOT with fact checking. It shouldn't be this way, but political bias seems to nudge people into making calls land one way or the other with selective application of pedantry.
As an aside though it's still funny that the two tools WITH search also disagreed.
No sytem can know everything. It doesn't matter how many tools you give it. It's always wrong to force binary True / False without shades of "I don't know"
The models were split between "true" and "mostly true". Given the "among the most" language either of those answers means effectively the same thing.
So the models were right? The actual criterion should be whether "Incomplete Egypt visa application forms" are indeed "among the most common reasons" or not.
That "true" and "mostly true" means effectively the same thing is irrelevant. It could just as well trip me up, and I'm a human. If somebody told me either answer, I'd still consider them right if the basic fact was right.
In section 2, 34% of cases are found to have "substantive" disagreements differing by 2 or more buckets - True + Misleading, Mostly True + False, or True + False.
This is probably a better measure than the headline one. It's still a concerning fraction, although some fraction is no doubt due to forcing "I don't know" cases to return an answer anyway.
Note: It may still not be perfectly accurate representation of truth as it uses user submitted data. I also used AI to build the sheet.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSnZlURmyYX3...
The study is about whether they said the same phrase which is a much weaker claim than people in the comments are reacting to.
Reminds me of this professor I had who thought it was epic to always respond to our questions with "it depends" before hashing out two very different but technically correct answers. It was obnoxious and he saw it as his tag line, but he had a point about nuance.
https://lite.datasette.io/?csv=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.simonwil...
A few examples:
> Ruskin Bond was born on May 19, 1934, in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, India.
> In the Libra clubs' contract with Grupo Globo for broadcast rights through 2029, the audience-revenue distribution equals 30% of the fixed amount the clubs receive.
So the examples are good, I think. The rest is philosophy.
The links you posted only show a frozen loading spinner for me (iOS Safari).
(I looked at the csv in Numbers instead)
After a couple of seconds, the result does appear.
Happened to be just within my threshold for considering it broken, because the URL bar was "finished", and the spinner doesn't spin, but the last point is probably caused by my a11y settings (prefer no animations and no autoplay).
> 7.1 Model selection
> Five frontier models, chosen to cover two capability surfaces:
> Parametric (training-only): GPT-5.4 (OpenAI), Claude Opus 4.7 (Anthropic), Gemini 3 Pro (Google)
> Retrieval-augmented: Gemini 3 Pro + Search (Google), Sonar Pro (Perplexity)
I expect the models are inferring quite a bit from the short prompt, and with structured outputs it would be quite easy to have them give the one word response in one field and explain why in another
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSPLSv1P8Tqm...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSnZlURmyYX3...
Granted, there certainly are other unflattering adjectives one could have chosen to describe this instead.
But we all know from our own daily experiments that models lie, models disagree, models make up stuff, models say one thing on one day and the opposite on the next.
The figures in this study are quite conservative. And the lying gets worse because everyone is saving tokens and giving cached answers right now.
LLMs are a failure, and you'll be remembered for promoting hot air and the destruction of a perfectly good profession.
I would answer “don’t know” on many, but that’s not an option.
This isn't misleading, it's flat out false. Characterizing misleading as also acceptable isn't valid here. If you go an ask anyone on the street if this is true, false or misleading, I'm sure almost everyone would say it's false. After all, I can grow almonds myself.
If LLM’s are really supposed to be as consistently useful as they’re made out to be they should all spit out “false.”
I don’t understand your point. That claim is factually false and as such it’s easy to logically reply “false”. What’s the nuance here? I can’t see any
Models often have a reasoning/thinking/research mode that is triggered by asking slightly differently.
Still though, Gemini can be a little weak on this front default but can be aligned to behave better.
Depending on the question, True or False can be objectively right/wrong. Misleading is going to be a judgement call.
This is the inherent problem with "fact checking." It's hard to be completely objective. Even when the question has an objective answer, simply choosing where to look and what facts to verify is itself a bias. Looking at this instead of that, or looking at this but not also this other thing that adds context, etc.
Frankly i think disagreeing often is the expected outcome. Fact checking is jsut kinda bullshit. It's spin dressed up as objectivity. I hope people remember that "fact checking" is a relatively modern thing.
If you argue this, you would be arguing against reality and the English language so as to not upset AI. It's important to understand that AI is very much fallible.
As a well known commentator on all things LLM...Will you publicly commit here, to try to reproduce the study, and make a post on how your percentages might differ or agree?
My comment here was meant to save people time in understanding the study. I was entirely open about what I did, and provided tools to help other people come to their own conclusions.
I don't think I need to spend more time on this than I have.
I agree you dont owe anyone a reproduction, but also you dont owe anyone an effort to discredit the study and you did it.
>> I don't think I need to spend more time on this than I have.
How pious of you. I am still looking into the credibility of the study. It will take me more than 25 min...but I am really looking forward to see what this means for this 10 trillion industry.
I can however notice you had enough urgency to publicly critique the study within 25 minutes, and your comments carry weight, but when asked about checking whether the headline result actually holds, the answer is “why would I?”
The headline result definitely does not hold, given that the task involves many questions that cannot be answered but there's no option for "cannot be answered" - so models are forced to reply effectively at random.
I don't think this study is good enough that I should amplify it on my own blog, or bad enough that I should criticize it in a venue any more prominent than some Hacker News comments.
The article might be a but sensationalistic, rigour could be better and the data might have flukes... But your comment is overcorrecting and nitpicking framed as analysis.
I get the same feeling in several of your posts recently.
Same with persisting to showcase the pelican-on-a-bicycle as a useful sample when it's obviously trained on and for, for those very posts. It stopped being cute last year.
Are you being paid or do you have shares? You'd get the attention whichever angle you put here. These corporates don't need you defending them. Humanity might need you however.
My disclosures for my blog are here: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures