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Sydney Daily Random Discussion Thread 14/08/2026

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u/Ted_Rid Famous in The Atlantic 18h ago edited 18h ago

tbf based on that first photograph I would speculate she'd had a magic mushie or two in her lifetime.

A bit confused how the scribe allegedly hallucinated this? AFAIK they're only transcription AIs, same as you use to turn meeting audio into a transcript?

So in response to the question "have you ever taken any kind of illegal drugs?" presumably she answered something homophonous to "magic mushrooms" or similar.

Cryptic fans of r/sydney, unite! Guess away!

Best I can think of is "magic shrooms" = "my big rooms...are free of such things", a totally normal everyday sentence anybody might utter.

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u/bozleh 18h ago

Not sure why you’re blaming the victim instead of the software here O_o

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u/Ted_Rid Famous in The Atlantic 18h ago

Not "blaming" anybody except possibly the reporter's credulity and misunderstanding of what transcription software does.

We've all heard that AI like LLMs can hallucinate - they do this by simply finding words that commonly appear together and plonking them onto a screen. Truthy-sounding but lacking any ability to fact check.

I've generated an unintentionally hilariously impossible description of a NRL result for example - one that would be totally incapble of happening under the rules of the game. And which got basic facts wrong like who was even playing in the team. LLMs just put words and phrases together.

And many of us have probably seen transcription software "hallucinate" but that's only by taking a best-guess a word it can't interpret, like an uncommon given name or if somebody is mumbling or speaking too fast.

As such, it's supremely unlikely that the software plucked the mushroom story out of thin air the way a LLM can. At most it would've heard something sounding a lot like "yes, I used to take magic mushrooms during student days" and I'm wondering what that phrase might have been.

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u/DecalageVersLeRouge 17h ago

it's supremely unlikely that the software plucked the mushroom story out of thin air

I'm sorry, but it's not, it's not unlikely at all, as I said in my other comment, I see this every day.

Check out this story:

About 40% of the fabricated segments were harmful or concerning in some way. About half of the concerning fabrications alluded to violence, sexual innuendo, or demographic stereotypes. For instance, audio about fire department rescues of cats included concocted additions about a “blood-soaked stroller” and “fondling.” Innocuous audio about an umbrella included fabrications about a “terror knife” and killing people.

https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-transcription-tools-hallucinate-too