Hacker News

The Reports of Jim Carrey's Death Are a Failure Mode

25 points by taubek ago | 25 comments

bebe9494i4 |next [-]

I do not care if journals or news publish fake information, it is a rag.

But hospitals and goverments should do much better verification. Not just follow what CNN or Fox broadcasted today.

trimethylpurine |root |parent [-]

[delayed]

ludamad |next |previous [-]

After being very concerned that the Google agent seriously believes hitting one's jaw with a hammer was a real phenomenon, citing that the real cases must be private, a medical journal mentioned it and they would never pick up tiktok rumours (they essentially did) etc I thought it would have surely been fooled here. I suppose if not, important facts like this could be agent-checked and need a 2/2 consensus in that case

amiga386 |root |parent |next [-]

> hitting one's jaw with a hammer was a real phenomenon

It isn't? I thought the main notoriety of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clavicular_(influencer) was his promotion of "bonesmashing"

Ah, but, perhaps none of it's real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looksmaxxing

> More dubiously, a practice known as bonesmashing, which refers to the act of hitting one's face against objects such as a hammer in order to create a "chiselled look", is often described when discussing looksmaxxing. This practice is considered an inside joke and is rarely done. Sources label it as misinformation.[23][24][25]

There appears to be a number of claims that people have done this, but no hard proof. Very much like an urban legend.

ludamad |root |parent [-]

Yeah exactly. It's a big circle of references without any hard proof. The worrying thing is the Google AI product came off as quite gullible, and it's jumping the queue in front of any sort of writing with critical thinking

slowmovintarget |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Gemini will confidently tell you "it can't possibly be a Chrome bug" even when, on certain rare occasions, it actually is. We even used Gemini to look at the code and find the bug, but it wouldn't admit this was a Chrome bug when approaching from the conversational angle.

Dilettante_ |root |parent [-]

Wow, it's so human already!

danlugo92 |root |parent |previous [-]

Or we could just stop celebrity worship

ludamad |root |parent |next [-]

Of all things, wanting to know if someone is still breathing is celebrity worship?

toast0 |root |parent |next [-]

Do you want to know if they're alive because of your personal relationship with them or because of their celebrity?

Maybe this isn't quite worship, but it's certainly related.

IncreasePosts |root |parent [-]

Maybe OP just likes the content that jim Carrey produces and wants to know if more will possibly keep coming out

DonHopkins |root |parent |previous [-]

I'd want to know when Trump stopped breathing, and I don't worship him as a celebrity.

browningstreet |root |parent |previous [-]

Or we could stop astroturfing cultural waves that’ll never subside

whattheheckheck |root |parent [-]

Who is we?

jimbobimbo |next |previous [-]

To be fair, the guy on the picture doesn't even look like Jim Carrey, so...

esafak |next |previous [-]

I think they ought to weight Wikipedia claims by the amount of exposure it has had.

comrade1234 |next |previous [-]

When it mentions jimmy carter's death I wasn't sure if the article was irony as I had completely missed that he had died (December 29, 2024 - not sure how I missed it, must have been ignoring the news that week)

delichon |next |previous [-]

I think AI has increased the volume of such mistakes, but not necessarily the ratio. Compare this to all too human false reports this week of Justice Alito's retirement.

Nina Totenberg was the source and has been remarkably honest about it. She saw some activity around the court, asked about it, heard "retirement announcements," and that was sufficient for her to rush a story about Alito retiring. Given her stature it was instant national news until a denial was issued.

It can be a win if the increased AI slop volume leads us to inspect all news more closely, regardless of source.

gdulli |root |parent |next [-]

What will actually happen is that instead of a person being accountable and taking a reputational hit, errors will be shrugged off as bugs and accountability will go off into the aether. Like all the other reasons to distrust the tech giants that have not meaningfully damaged or corrected them.

iwontberude |root |parent [-]

This is what gives me hope that we will have a societal collapse and be forced to reckon with the monster we’ve been pressing snooze on (oligarchy). AI gives people the tools to press forward to and beyond their level of incompetence and accelerate us to a place where they cannot sustain.

toast0 |root |parent |previous [-]

> She saw some activity around the court, asked about it, heard "retirement announcements,"

You missed the nuance. She had left the press room and noticed many others hadn't; asking about why not, she heard "retirement announcement", but what was said was "retirement announcements"

A singular announcement, that people were waiting around to listen to, would have only been Alito. Multiple announcements could include Alito or not, but would include staff and what not. A singular staff retirement would not have kept people for long.

delichon |root |parent [-]

> A singular announcement, that people were waiting around to listen to, would have only been Alito.

To me this is a wishful leap, more so that you would break a historic news story based on it. It seems to be a kind of Rorschach test. What do you see in this random blob? Both natural and artificial intelligences have answers ready, so it's a real problem but not novel.

toast0 |root |parent [-]

There'a a push in the news industry to want the scoop.

I don't know the exact timeline and circumstances, but if you leave the press room to go call in your story from the opinion releases, and notice it's been several minutes and nobody else came out, obviously you missed something.

If that something is one person retired, they're probably saying a few words or being sent off with some words etc, so that'd be a Justice and Alito is known to be retiring 'soon'.

It's like when your company is struggling and all of a sudden there's a mandatory all hands meeting in the morning. Gonna be layoffs (but sometimes it's not)

Razengan |next |previous [-]

The title made my heart skip a beat

therobots927 |previous [-]

Regardless of the facts, it would be a lot better if Jim Carrey directly addressed this. I don’t blame people for falling down conspiracy rabbit holes when someone they look up to dramatically changes their appearance and doesn’t say anything about it.