One AI slop/hallucination sign I haven’t seen pointed out before are use of weasel words like “sometimes” and “occasionally.” It seems to use these when it doesn’t have an explanation for a problem and is confidently speculating. This is most noticeable when it’s giving a false diagnosis for a syntax error in a programming language (“default is a reserved keyword in Groovy. Occasionally, it may result in a syntax error if you use ‘default’ as the key in a hashmap”).
(This particular example is from Gemini fast mode. 3.0 pro recognized the true problem and proposed an effective solution).
One AI slop/hallucination sign I haven’t seen pointed out before are use of weasel words like “sometimes” and “occasionally.” It seems to use these when it doesn’t have an explanation for a problem and is confidently speculating. This is most noticeable when it’s giving a false diagnosis for a syntax error in a programming language (“default is a reserved keyword in Groovy. Occasionally, it may result in a syntax error if you use ‘default’ as the key in a hashmap”).
(This particular example is from Gemini fast mode. 3.0 pro recognized the true problem and proposed an effective solution).
Notably this works for humans too!
(occasionally)