That grumpy BSD guy: How 'Artificial Intelligence' Is Slowly Drowning In Its Own Droppings
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That grumpy BSD guy
Field notes and occasional musings by Peter on Stuff that happens, from a free software perspective, mainly OpenBSD, FreeBSD.
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
How 'Artificial Intelligence' Is Slowly Drowning In Its Own Droppings
© 2026 Peter N. M. Hansteen
A website designed to appeal to humans' vanity serves to reveal how the large language models degrade by ingesting each others' unverified output
In early July 2026, I was made aware of the website intheweights.com via a fediverse post. The idea is simple, and appeals to human vanity: You type in your name, and the site checks the various large language models for any data it can find on you in the models.
with trackers but nicer formatting here.<br>--><br>Note: This piece is also available without trackers but classic formatting only here.
The post I responded to appears to be no longer available, but I checked out my own results and posted the results with screenshots:
Post by @pitrh@mastodon.social<br>View on Mastodon
If for some reason the embedded post is not readable, I also saved screenshots of the site output.
First up, the main result, with what seems to be the highest confidence score:
608 STRENGTH • TOP 6%<br>GPT-5.5 SAYS<br>NORWEGIAN TECHNOLOGIST AND AUTHOR KNOWN FOR OPENBSD, PF FIREWALL ADVOCACY, AND THE BOOK THE BOOK OF PF•" src="https://nxdomain.no/~peter/Peter_tokens_realitybased.png" width="60%"><br>Initial highest scored intheweights.com assessment based on my name July 2 2026:<br>PETER N. M. HANSTEEN
OPENBSD PF FIREWALL AUTHOR
> 608 STRENGTH • TOP 6%
GPT-5.5 SAYS
NORWEGIAN TECHNOLOGIST AND AUTHOR KNOWN FOR OPENBSD, PF FIREWALL ADVOCACY, AND THE BOOK THE BOOK OF PF•"
Fair enough, I advocate OpenBSD but did not write any part of the operating system, I wrote The Book of PF, and I work in the tech industry.
I addition, there were two entries that I was pleased to see the site labeled as likely hallucinations:
Initial intheweights.com assessment 1 of 2 of likely hallucinations based on my name July 2 2026:<br>PETER N. M. HANSTEEN
NORWEGIAN SOLAR PHYSICIST
52 STRENGTH•
GROK 4.20 SAYS
NORWEGIAN SOLAR PHYSICIST SPECIALIZING IN THE SUN'S CHROMOSPHERE, TRANSITION REGION, AND CORONAL HEATING.
That is definitely not me. For context, according to the Name Search service on Statistics Norway's (Statistisk Sentralbyrå) website, we are only 140 persons who have Hansteen as their surname, and Fewer than four people or no one has the name Peter Nicolai Mathias Hansteen, and to my knowledge I do not share first names with any living relative.
I am no longer active on the site that used to be called Twitter, which is where I assume Grok finds a significant subset of the data it ingests. But while there, since the late noughties until shortly after the site was sold, I may very well have posted about global warming with links to actual studies that involve solar phenomena.
The next entry I found a bit more bizarre, to wit:
Initial intheweights.com assessment 2 of 2 of likely hallucinations based on my name July 2 2026:<br>PETER NM. HANSTEEN<br>NORWEGIAN GEOPHYSICIST
46 STRENGTH
That one is a bit strange. While I do have a living close relative who is a geologist with publications in academic journals, this entry seems to have taken most of its data from the biography of Christopher Hansteen. We are related, but as can seen from the Wikpedia article, separated by several generations.
But at least, the site considered both of those to be likely hallucinations.
But give it a couple of weeks
For whatever reason (er, actually my laziness), the intheweights.com tab stayed open in my browser, and I went back to check the results on July 21st.
The first entry was much the same,
Highest scored intheweights.com assessment based on my name July 21 2026:<br>PETER N. M. HANSTEEN
OPENBSD PF fIREWALL AUTHOR
731 STRENGTH • TOP 4%
GPT-5. 5 SAYS
NORWEGIAN TECHNOLOGIST AND AUTHOR KNOWN FOR OPENBSD, PF FIREWALL ADVOCACY, AND THE BOOK THE BOOK OF PF.
Oddly enough, the confidence had risen a bit, and I was now in the top four percent. I still did not write that operating system, I only use it and like it enough that I will likely talk about it to strangers.
The second had apparently been moved up the ranks and was no longer considered a likely hallucination:
Second highest intheweights.com assessment based on my name July 21 2026:<br>PETER N. M. HANSTEEN
NORWEGIAN SOLAR PHYSICIST
43 STRENGTH • TOP 95%
GROK 4.20 SAYS
NORWEGIAN SOLAR PHYSICIST SPECIALIZING IN THE SUN'S CHROMOSPHERE, TRANSITION REGION, AND CORONAL HEATING.
So what happened here is that Grok had grown more confident in its most likely imaginary physicist. Another close but no longer living relative was a physicist, but the description does not map well to their actual published work.
Then thankfully, the last item was still considered a likely...