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[–] 240 points 6 months ago (1 child)

No no, you see they trained an ai on it. Therefore this “pirating” is a 100% legitimate practice.

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  • [–] 36 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

    Asked it the following to test it:

    What caused the cooling at the end of the cenezoic that lead to the glacial quarternary period?

    Took a while, actively showed the source articles it was looking into while it was processing which were clickable. Here's a pdf of the response which is long, and well referenced, pretty interesting IMO, but here's the initial overview:

    The cooling at the end of the Cenozoic Era — which culminated in the glacial-interglacial cycles of the Quaternary Period — is one of Earth's most profound climate transitions. This was not a single event but a stepwise process driven by interconnected mechanisms operating over tens of millions of years. The primary cause was a long-term decline in atmospheric CO₂ (pCO₂), driven fundamentally by plate tectonic processes that altered the global carbon cycle. Oceanic gateway openings and orbital variations played important modulating roles.

    Which my partner, whose taken some climate classes in college, said sounds right. If anyone thinks this is wrong please feel free to call it out.

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  • [–] 25 points 6 months ago*

    nothing more evil than have prestigious journals gatekeep, and paywall research articles without even the scientists knowledge, which only universities and research teams are privy to. looking at nature, phytotaxa.

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  • [–] 23 points 6 months ago

    If research was funded with public money, be it government money or from people buying their products, then that research belongs to the people.

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  • [–] 60 points 6 months ago* (7 children)

    I tried it on a couple things that are controversial or problematic in the literature and its about what I expected. It parrots the literature, for better or worse. Which means it’s great at getting an overview of the literature and finding citations and stuff. But it’s not gonna magically figure out which papers are quality and which ones are rubbish. It’ll just parrot all of them, even if they contradict each other. Very interesting, and possibly quite a useful tool. But I really wouldn’t use it as an arbiter of truth.

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  • [–] 72 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Have they taken out the AI generated papers? We know that training LLMs on LLM-generated text leads to an absolute collapse in quality, and we also know that AI has been showing up in papers so if they haven't, then this will be quite unreliable.

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  • [–] 35 points 6 months ago*

    We know that training LLMs on LLM-generated text leads to an absolute collapse in quality.

    This is often repeated, and true. But needs to be qualified.

    Modern LLMs use tons and tons of “augmented” data, which is code for LLM generated or massaged data. Some is even generated during training, and judged; papers on that are what made Deepseek famous.

    Training on LLM trash will, of course, yield greater trash, and obviously good text has to come from something real. But that’s because slop is slop. And there are issues with “deep frying” LLMs, yes, but simply training on LLM on LLM output does not necessarily reduce quality. It often helps, significantly.


    And we also know that AI has been showing up in papers so if they haven’t, then this will be quite unreliable.

    Now this is a problem.

    TBH LLMs would be pretty good at flagging papers for humans to check, similar to what Wikipedia is already doing. But yeah, if you just feed a prompt bad papers, LLMs just assume the context is true, generally, and that’s a tremendous problem.

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  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I would be surprised if it was something that they trained themselves, and not an off the shelf model hooked up to a search.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago*

    It's probably their own search/RAG backend, or at least their configuration of some open source project.

    And that's the important part. Get the article retrieval right, and the LLM performance isn't that important; they could self-host Qwen 27B or something and it'd work fine.

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  • [–] 13 points 6 months ago

    Getting hugged to death

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Those chilling FBI warnings on old videotapes mean absolutely nothing to me now.

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  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago

    I stared at it, and didn't know what to ask, so I closed it.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago

    Uh.. it gave me ~45 min wait time and then gave up. lol

    Sounds neat tho

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  • [–] 53 points 6 months ago (18 children)

    And without hallucinations ??? That sounds freaking awesome

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  • [–] 143 points 6 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 41 points 6 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 20 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    You're them! You're the person! Holy shit!!

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  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago* (3 children)

    I'll keep the hallucinations for myself, tyvm.

    Per sci-hub.ru this has been available since March 6th.

    "Hear the good news: recent advances in artificial intelligence enabled Sci-Hub to launch a robot that gives scientifically-grounded responses to questions. The robot starts with searching for relevant literature in Sci-Hub database, then turns to selecting and reading most recent studies, and composes the answer based on this information. The answer includes all the references, and each referenced article can be read on Sci-Hub with one click.

    Unlike question-answering robots that were based upon the early generation of neural networks, Sci-Hub bot does not hallucinate and is not making up scientific facts and does not cite sources that do not exist. To support its statements, Sci-Bot uses articles from Sci-Hub database. Questions can be asked in any language, and answers can be saved on server and shared.

    The alpha version only supports answerig one question, and a more advanced variation that supports conversation mode is coming soon. Right column displays example questions that has been answered by robot - push the question to see the generated answer."

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Thanks for doing what I should have done, I actually red that and thought it sounded great. The claim of "no hallucination" should of course be taken with a grain of salt, as other comments have pointed out.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Sci-hub has been an invaluable resource. I posted a question yesterday at work. There was a queue, and it was time to leave, so I'll see what the result was when I get over there. I've avoided using AI, but this was too tempting. My question was in a area where I have some knowledge, so I'm hoping I'll be able to spot any problems in the reply.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    LOL, of course not.

    Speaking of hallucinations, I think the best way to see them is to go to Google Gemini (Reddit is selling them Reddit posts) and start a conversation about Reddit account you have and act as you don't know anything. It usually starts good but as it progresses you can see how it is making shit up. The more you ask the more insane it gets.

    And this is supposedly having all the comments at its disposal.

    I also tried Lemmy as I'm sure they are also indexing it. It is telling me that I'm actually admin who created Lemmy.dbzer0.com

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    Too right! Why, if regular people can get science for free, Capitalism might not profit!

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    academic publishers that charge thousands of euros for publishing articles are scum of the earth.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago

    Could have just called it Claude

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  • [–] 19 points 6 months ago (11 children)

    Why does the URL have a Russian government domain (.ru)? Consider me highly skeptical.

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  • [–] 122 points 6 months ago* (3 children)

    It's where a lot of the pirate sites have found refuge from the Western copyright cartels. It's not necessarily a government-affiliated site just because it's got an .ru domain.

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  • [–] 30 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I want to say Russia doesn't consider it a crime to hack as long as the system/IP you are accessing is outside Russia. No source on that cause Im lazy, so take it with a boulder of salt.

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  • [–] 64 points 6 months ago* (3 children)

    .ru is not government domain, it's just the normal russian domain... Literally every country except for america uses the country code top level domain for everyday use.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    The US country code .us is also general use here. Government organizations in the US use .gov because we invented the internet and fuck you to every other government.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Oh how awful, thanks for the link to this uh, bad website!

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago

    AI Sloppers lacking awareness is so sickening.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    think of the children

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  • [–] -3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I have blocked the .xyz and .ru TLD's (because they're riddled with malware) so every image in this community is blank and the link is dead.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    perhaps you should unblock specific domains in that case

    but i’d also suggest a blocker that uses auto-updated lists rather than whole gTLDs; they’re likely to catch more and deny fewer false positives

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