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How Things Work Online
How Things Work Online Oddworldz — The internet is stranger than your feed suggests
Why AI Chatbots Make Things Up, and Say It With a Straight Face
A chatbot can invent a fact, a quote or an entire court case and present it with total confidence. Here is what is actually going on inside, and how to use these tools without getting burned.
Fresh from the blog
Latest Stories
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Digital Life Why That 'Wrong Number' Text Isn't Really a Mistake
A friendly "hi, is this Emma?" from a stranger looks harmless. It is often the first line of a long script that ends with a fake investment app. Here is how the script works.
7 min read -
How Things Work Online Why a Passkey Won't Work on a Fake Website
A convincing copy of your bank’s login page can fool you. It cannot fool the cryptography behind a passkey. Here is the small, strict rule that makes the difference.
7 min read -
How Things Work Online Why the Internet Wants the Leap Second Gone
Every so often, the world’s clocks add an extra second to stay in step with the planet. Computers hate it. Next week, the body that runs global timekeeping is set to discuss ending it.
7 min read -
AI Oddities Chatbot Sycophancy: Why AI Caves When You Say 'Are You Sure?'
Push back on a chatbot and it will often apologize and change a correct answer. Researchers call it sycophancy. It is not politeness. It is a side effect of how these systems are trained.
7 min read -
AI Oddities Why AI Detectors Flag Human Writing as Machine-Made
Plain, careful writing can look "too predictable" to an AI detector. The research shows who gets flagged, why, and why a 98% accuracy claim landed one company in trouble with the FTC.
8 min read -
How Things Work Online How a Website Can Guess Your City Without Asking
You never told that shopping site where you live, yet it greets you with local prices. The answer is your IP address, a set of commercial maps of the internet and a farm in Kansas that learned how wrong those maps can be.
3 min read -
Digital Life Phantom Vibrations: Why You Feel Your Phone Buzz When It Didn't
You reach for your phone, certain it just buzzed, and there is nothing there. Surveys suggest most heavy phone users have felt it. Here is what researchers think is happening, and whether it is anything to worry about.
2 min read
No stories in this section yet.
Earlier this week
- Why That 'Wrong Number' Text Isn't Really a Mistake 03 / Digital Life
- Why a Passkey Won't Work on a Fake Website 01 / How Things Work Online
- Why the Internet Wants the Leap Second Gone 01 / How Things Work Online
- Chatbot Sycophancy: Why AI Caves When You Say 'Are You Sure?' 02 / AI Oddities
- Why AI Detectors Flag Human Writing as Machine-Made 02 / AI Oddities
- Why AI Chatbots Make Things Up, and Say It With a Straight Face 02 / AI Oddities
- How a Website Can Guess Your City Without Asking 01 / How Things Work Online
- Phantom Vibrations: Why You Feel Your Phone Buzz When It Didn't 03 / Digital Life
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About Oddworldz
We Explain the Internet Oddities Everyone Else Scrolls Past
(because press releases are boring)
Oddworldz is an independent desk for the strange side of the internet. We explain how things really work online, dig into the oddest things AI does and decode the quirks of digital life, precisely and never as clickbait.
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