Pluralistic: Discernment (28 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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Today's links

Discernment: How can you fact-check AI when you're asking it to teach you something you don't understand?

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Discernment (permalink)

As far as I can tell, this dialog between MacArthur prize-winning mathematician Terrence Tao and Chatgpt about "the Jacobian conjecture counterexample" is very impressive:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5fdc7a-d6f8-83e8-bbea-8deb42cfed56

Now, the clause "as far as I can tell" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I am reasonably math literate, up to first-year calculus and a lifetime spent around my father (a mathematician). However, I have never heard of "the Jacobian conjecture," and while I know what all the words in the first paragraph of the relevant Wikipedia entry mean, I can't parse any of the sentences they form:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture

In other words, I lack the discernment to evaluate the output of the chatbot that Tao exchanged theories with. If you showed me an equally opaque transcript of a "conversation" between a chatbot and a crank with AI psychosis whose math made no sense whatsoever, I couldn't make an a priori judgment about which one was a solid piece of mathematical theorizing and which one was a math-flavored word-salad.

As many skilled programmers can attest, chatbots can produce very useful output – but as even the most ardent AI-assisted coder will admit, chatbot-written code is also full of baffling, obvious errors (and subtle, hard-to-spot ones):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs

These errors (which the industry wants us to refer to as "hallucination" – a whimsical, obscuring, anthropomorphizing euphemism) are the reason that reliable AI use requires the discernment that comes from skill and expertise. I use a local chatbot to spellcheck these posts. Chatbots spot all kinds of typos that regular spellcheckers miss:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback

There's a reactionary group of strangers who seek me out to tell me that I'm a bad person for doing this. These are pointless conversations, mostly because I can barely make out a word over the scraping sounds of all the goalpost-moving these scolding strangers engage in.

They start by insisting that I'm burning down the planet by running a low-CPU load piece of software on my own computer. After I explain that running a chatbot on my machine uses no more carbon than, say, applying a blur effect to an image in my image editor, they tell me I'm unwisely giving my private data to the AI companies. Then I show them the network logs that demonstrate that my local chatbot doesn't send or receive any network data.

Then they turn to the supposed cognitive effects of using a chatbot to find typos in an essay. I explain that I'm not asking an AI to write things for me or explain them to me – I'm asking it to point out where I've forgotten to put a period at the end of a paragraph, or fatfingered a word like "ever" as "every." I even send them the "before" and "after" of an essay after I've corrected some chatbot-identified typos in it:

https://craphound.com/before.txt

https://craphound.com/after.txt

This is when things get increasingly pointless. My interlocutors come up with farcical reasons why it's immoral or dangerous to use this LLM-based spellchecker. They say I'm using too much compute and that I could use a simpler piece of software to do the same thing (which is both untrue and silly – I also run a journaling filesystem on my computer that is vastly overpowered for editing a textfile – who cares?). Or they insist that the mere act of making copies of published works in order to count their elements and the relationships between them is a sin, despite the fact that this standard would kill search engines, the Internet Archive, and the Oxford English Dictionary:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

I mean, by all means let's hate the AI companies and work to end their disgusting campaign to pauperize creative workers, but let's not fall into the trap of siding with the media bosses who insist that the salvation of creative labor will arrive when Sam Altman pays David Zaslav for the right to cram the entire Warner catalog into...