cyclecycle
Joined 9 years ago
Joined 9 years ago
we build a product called Veracity focused on citation and claim checking. legal is a major focus for us, also scientific and technical publishing, where we detect hallucinated citations in submitted works and all that jazz
planning to release something soon focused on the LLM harness layer
we've been working on the problem for years. gradually getting traction
all completely closed source atm, though we often revisit that discussion
i would contest a sibling comment - the solution is not RAG, at least not entirely. 1) because it doesn't necessarily involve 'generation' (e.g our grounding model doesn't depend on gen ai) and 2) RAG is just enriching the context. even if you can get the retrieval right (not a given) it doesn't guarentee that the LLM will faithfully or correctly use that context, or that all its claims are supported by sources. RAG is not the same as traceability and verification
I'll add they also seem to make 'bad' judgement calls around which layer to implement something, often preferring downstream fixes/hacks/workarounds when upstream fixes would be better.
They also duplicate code lots rather than finding and reusing existing.
Both of these patterns lead to degradation and time wasting in complex code bases. Part of the behavioural adaptation I've made in using these tools is heading these off as much as possible at prompt-time
My prompts are often verbose to several paragraphs
So there are absolutely a bunch of tasks that could be evaled/benchmarked, but "hallucination rate" isn't particularly applicable/interesting as a metric of how good the tool is
that said, we do use various LLMs (mostly local, fine-tuned, small, for things like NER/parsing/metadata comparison, etc.). and they can and do hallucinate, but we have very hard constraints on the validation, so any extraction results that don't match 1:1 back to the input text are discarded for example. so again, rather than hallucination risk we prefer hard constraints
Nick Morley from Grounded AI here (https://groundedai.company)
We ran the analysis in collaboration with Nature :)
We collaborated with Nature here to study the extent of fake/frankenstein citations in scholarly literature (from top 5 publishers - Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, Sage, Taylor & Francis)
We're estimating hundreds of thousands of papers affected in 2025 with hallucinated citation issues
As part of the work we analysed 20k papers generated with ChatGPT API to figure out which citation errors are characteristic of gen AI use and use that classify the errors we saw in the wild.
The world's gone mad, publishing is in a nuts state, the training data is poisoned!
I'm a big fan of focusing on verification tools ("Verification is all you need"?) but who knows.
I'm sure I'm missing something in my perspective. Here to expand my aperture
I work on Veracity https://groundedai.company/veracity/ which does citation checking for academic publishers. I see stuff like this all the time in paper submissions. Publishers are inundated
What we've found is that vector similarity is often not the final solution. It is still only a crude proxy for the true goal of 'informativeness' or 'usefulness' with relation to the user goal/query. Works okay, but we're definitely seeing a need for more rigorous LLM-postprocessing to enrich the results set.
Which, yes, the time adds up quick!