AI failures and successes

In previous posts, I've mentioned several cases where AI tools (such as LLMs) failed to answer my questions. To balance things out, this time I'm going to talk about two failures and one success.

The problem I posed was the following: There was a quote I wanted to use in one of my book reviews, but I wasn't sure of the exact words or the author, although I suspected it might be by C.S. Lewis. As I remembered, the quote was:

Every decade in England and every year in the United States, someone says to have discovered what Shakespeare really meant.

Hypothetical science and dark matter

Bullet Cluster, hot gas in pink, dark matter in blue

In several previous posts in this blog, I have pointed out that physicists and cosmologists frequently forget the real world and construct theories based on speculations not based on concrete data, observations, or experiments, but only in their imagination. Let’s look at a few examples:

·         Is physics losing touch with reality? In this post, published in 2017, I used as examples the various theories about multiverses, the theory of everything, and some ideas that would make it possible to build a time machine (in principle, but hardly in practice).

·         Is physics: science or literature? In this post, published in 2018, I referred to Freeman Dyson's procedure for extracting energy from stars and the idea that an advanced civilization could resist the accelerated expansion of the universe.

·         Pathological science, wishful science, or ironic science? This post, published in 2023, points out eleven cases of scientific research without experimental basis.

The dark side of AI

Those companies that market Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAI (ChatGPT and GPT-4), Google (GEMINI), Meta (Llama), Anthropic (Claude), and Deepseek, establish controls to prevent their tools from being used for nefarious purposes, such as assisting a young person in committing suicide, providing instructions for building Molotov cocktails or atomic bombs, helping to design viruses potentially usable in biological warfare, or teaching how to manufacture dangerous drugs.

The problem is that these controls are fallible, as demonstrated by cybersecurity expert Dave Kuszmar, who published a summary of his research in an article that appeared in the IEEE's Spectrum magazine in August 2026. Their fallibility makes them dangerous, but the companies in question seem to ignore the dangers and remain silent when they are brought to their attention.

Kuszmar has developed at least seven procedures to bypass the controls of commercial LLMs and obtain dangerous information. The first two were these:

Persons cited in Populscience

Poisson distribution of person names

I enjoy compiling statistics on many things. Naturally, I also do it for this blog. One of the statistics I often compile is that of the names of people (scientists or otherwise) most frequently mentioned in the blog, which now has 564 posts. I presented such a table in January 2024, when 449 articles had been published, in the post titled Ten years of Divulciencia-Populscience, and I think it's time to update it. Here is the corresponding table, showing 40 people who have been mentioned at least 10 times.

Human Dignity: Religion, Politics, or Natural Morality?

The sentence against Socrates

In connection with his visit to Spain, and in particular his address to the Parliament, Pope Leo XIV has been criticized in some media outlets for having argued that democratic parliaments must be subject to certain basic moral norms, such as those associated with human dignity. It has been said that the Pope was speaking as head of the Catholic Church, that the Spanish Parliament is not composed solely of Catholics, and that he should not have questioned the legitimacy of the Parliament to enact laws, based on the majority rule. This is the paragraph that has attracted the most disagreement:

Paradoxes of Time Travel

In several previous posts, I have discussed various paradoxes that time travel could cause if it were possible. Travels to the future controlled from the past do not cause paradoxes. That they are possible is obvious, since we all travel to the future at a rate of twenty-four hours each day.

It is also possible to travel to the future if one is in a coma and later awakens; or through hibernation, if it were possible, which it is not at the moment, but it may become so someday; or by traveling through space at relativistic speeds, which would result in a time dilation that, upon returning to the starting point, translates into a journey to the future. This last procedure is not possible right now, but it could become so someday, apart from the technical difficulties of achieving it.

Units of Length

It was natural for humans to use their own dimensions as a basis to measure distances. Thus arose the inch, the width of a thumb; the span, the width of the palm of the hand with spread fingers; the foot, the length of a human foot; the cubit, the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger; the fathom, the distance between the two hands with outstretched arms; the pace, the distance between the two feet while walking; and so on.

This system of measurement has two problems. The first: that these lengths depend on each person. The second: that they are not simple multiples of one another. To solve the first problem, standard values ​​were introduced. To solve the second problem, some of the measurements were slightly modified. Thus, in England, the inch was approximated by one-twelfth of a foot. This introduced a third problem, because each country chose different standard values ​​and made approximations in its own way.