technology
Google's family of large language models and the chatbot built on them. In episode 01 it is the cautionary example: asked for quotations from Jiddu Krishnamurti, it produced plausible ones he never said, and admitted it only when asked. Start at about 28 minutes.
Across the episodes
01
Enters as the cautionary tale: a frontier model inventing quotations from a real speaker
Gemini stands for the general-purpose shortcut the episode argues against: one model asked to transcribe, summarize, and quote all at once.
"Because if you people have asked me, why don't I just take my podcast and dump it into Google Gemini or something like that?"Chad Nantais, Syntopic, Episode 1 (11 Oct 2026), 27:51
The model's own answer is the evidence: it had generated likely quotations rather than retrieved real ones, and said so only when challenged.
"they're not actual verbatim quotes they're quotes that he could have said based on you know his philosophical principles"Gemini, quoted by Chad Nantais, Syntopic, Episode 1 (11 Oct 2026), 0:26
Connections
example ofHallucination
Fabricated quotations presented as real.