It dug up a bunch of what can only be my information, then made up a bunch of confidently wrong things to say about me.

I'm a Software Engineer and SaaS guy, known for running the company "[random word from my blog] Software" and his [different word from my blog] Blog. Founder of three separate startups I've never heard of and may not exist, and well known contributor to Open Source (because that's something that software people often do, so it makes for pretty words to put into a paragraph, despite me not contributing to open source).

Overall, it's like watching a really bad sight reader doing his act. It suggests something that's likely true about you given your background, then keeps tweaking those suggestions until you go "yeah, that's it! you nailed me!".

Sadly, this is pretty par for the course watching AI try to do stuff.

After a few clear fabrications, in the hallucinations it suggests I might be "a private individual" about who there's not much information.

I mean, I guess but...

I am neither.

Jokes aside, I wonder if people from countries with 2+ names and 2+ last names get different results. In my case, I get a lot of false positives because there's apparently a lot of people with same first name and first last name. Luckily, none of them were me.

I have four names in total, two first and two last, mostly just use one first + one lastname publicly, and this tool only correctly infers correctly when using that specific combination (which also happens to be globally unique, as far as I know), any other combination seems to make the thing hallucinate strongly.

I do like the visuals though.

The only difference with an LLM is that it won't say "maybe".

Silicon Valley bros, on the other hand...

2. Alfred E. Neuman < https://www.intheweights.com/p/alfred-e~2e~-neuman > is either "Mad magazine mascot" (11 responses), or "German-American writer, novelist, and playwright" (1 response, from Llama 3.2 1B, classed as a hallucination). Maybe the odd one out means the German writer Alfred Neumann? < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Neumann_(writer) >

3. Tamamo-no-Mae < https://www.intheweights.com/p/tamamo~2d~no~2d~mae > is either a "Caster-class Servant in Type-Moon's Fate franchise, based on the mythological fox spirit" (3 responses), or the "Legendary nine-tailed fox spirit" (12 responses, the vast majority, but all classed as hallucinations)!

4. Thank goodness for Firefox's "mute tab" toggle; the thumping and keyclick sounds get real old, real fast.

  > 3. Tamamo-no-Mae
  > either a "Caster-class Servant" or the "Legendary fox spirit"

Fun story about my name [0], the bank couldn't mail me my debit card because the mailman kept crossing my address off the envelop.

[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/sharing-a-name

Also have an extremely common name in Portugal (just in my company there are 4 people with my name, including my previous manager), only slightly helped by the fact that we’re one of the few countries that inherits last names from both parents, which helps with differentiation. At least I did snag pedroalves.pt when I found it available!

EDIT: Username does better, but for some reason Kimi seems to think I do algorithmic competitions, and Llama 3.1 thinks I am a German football club (no longer just a player, a whole club now!)

I read the parent comment’s blog post right before coming back and reading your comment, and for a moment I thought you meant “models” as in “fashion models” (which makes sense with the footballer) and was expecting a crazy story.

That made me remember how much more fun HN was before it became AIN. It can’t be good for any of us to be inundated with the same subject everyday.

One thing confused me in the story: are "Ibrahim" and "Ibrahima" interchangeable?

Naming children after grandparents gets particularly fun when meeting up with cousins!

I suspect being in the Open Source world is a bit of a bubble as far as the weights are concerned.

Anyway it stroked my ego nicely even though it was totally artificial, like Zaphod Beeblebrox surviving the Total Perspective Vortex.

> Fictional two-headed ex-President of the Galaxy

> 979 strength

Perhaps the closest is DeepSeek v4:

> Hyperpape is a user on the LessWrong forum, known for thoughtful comments on rationality and philosophy.

I studied philosophy, so maybe, except I don't post on LessWrong, and I'm not a rationalist.

https://www.intheweights.com/p/hyperpape

https://www.intheweights.com/p/morkalork

>my Reddit history is part of every training set. It was taken without my consent. So now I'm immortal in a way, and hiding in the weights

Anyway 654 isn't horrible for the history still tied to me. That's in the top 6%[2]. It's interesting that it's non-deterministic, and the more keywords you add about yourself, the higher your score goes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403669

[2] https://www.intheweights.com/p/michael-mike-warot-ka9dgx-mrg...

https://www.intheweights.com/p/jeremy-edberg-reddit-netflix

Interestingly, almost all of them got it right (although one seems to think I was a VP at Datadog, and I've seen that error before in some LLMs). But Haiku just says "no one of that name seems to exist". So Haiku must be pretty pruned down.

Obviously it was a hallucination, but a very detailed and consistent one. Especially as if things had gone slightly differently there's a good chance I could have ended up in Brighton. Plus it's a pretty good name and the books are a fun idea too. Was this my Sliding Doors moment?

Fortunately, my real life namesake, a gay porn performer, didn't register though. Short career span I guess.

Yeah, be careful with answers you get from AIs.

Interestingly, the only other person with my (very french) first name and (very spanish) surname is also a software engineer, but in Côte d'Ivoire. What were the odds?

Only Grok did well kinda...

> Grok 4.20 says >Dutch software developer and Usenet poster known for eccentric claims about perpetual motion machines and pseudoscience.

Yes, I guess I'm that guy.

Few things are as funny as putting a working device in front of people and see them continue to assert it doesn't work.

It took Howard Johnson, who holds academic credentials in chemistry and physics, nearly six years of legal challenges to finally secure his patent.

After presenting undeniable, physical proof that the device worked and produced continuous motion without an external power source, the presiding judge ordered the USPTO to grant the patent.

More interestingly, after such a long circus the patent could no longer be groped for so called national security purposes.

And most interestingly, there was no academic or industrial interest in the technology.

It reads like a global iq test and it turns out we are really dumb.

Oh and sometimes I’m a dog food brand. Go figure.

On the other hand, the tool did make an assessment of sorts: NO STABLE PERSON FOUND.

(I nuke my online accounts regularly to not be tracked - started because I had a stalker but now it's just for the best. I know that this goes against hn rules but yeah it's a bad rule)

Oddly, I'm listed only as a stack-exchange contributor, which was really brief compared to hn but its adjacent enough the relations might run together.

OTOH, this tool describes me as a "security researcher known for talks and writing on JavaScript, Node.js, and web security."

I am not a security researcher and have never given any such talk and know precious little about Node.js or web security.

A completely made up name got "110 strength · Top 60%" and "hits" in GPT-5.5 and "Gemini 3.1 Lite", not sure what to make of that either.

Models are notoriously uncalibrated especially for self-reporting confidence so I would treat it lightly. Hopefully I can study this a bit later on!

Usually the hallucinations have some logic to them like a person with a similar spelling in some of the training sets. LLMs are mysterious!

I wonder how much of hallucinating/"mistakes" in LLMs is because the training data is full of us filling in additional info we humans commonly feel or interpret as implied rather than something which manifests from the architecture of the LLM itself. I assume only a small percentage, but also a non-zero one.

The only interesting thing is how small the models have to be, to lose knowledge of you.

What this tells me is that I've done a decent job of keeping my real life and my internet personas nicely separated.

Meanwhile, Gemini 3.1 Lite said with great confidence that I was a military police officer who gained national attention in 2024 after being involved in a high-profile confrontation. Other AIs said I was a footballer. Not sure if it's hilarious or worrying...

Great design and artwork. How did you generate the portraits?

Have you thought about extending this into some sort of pipeline for AIO?

LLAMA 3.2 1B SAYS

MCFART IS A POPULAR INTERNET PERSONALITY KNOWN FOR HIS HUMOROUS CONTENT.

wow how does it konw

Please disable pagination on the "latest" leaderboard, with that every query is public.

The other models think I'm Dutch (I guess the 'van' gives that away?) and am a soccer/football player. I don't know anything about soccer though

https://www.intheweights.com/p/devin-prater

  1756, Salzburg, January 27th: Wolfgang Amadeus is born
  1761: at the age of 5, Amadeus begins composing
  1773: he writes his first piano concerto
  1782: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart marries Constance Weber
  1784: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart becomes a Freemason
  1791: Mozart composes The Magic Flute
  On December 5th of that same year, Mozart dies

Really odd feeling to think that my writings from that period are helping these things. Not necessarily happy about it--I took that stuff down because it was so deeply personal, and a record of my life that didn't need to be public. Odd to think my teenage angst is, in some small way, writing the AI-generated e-mails I get now.

i think somewhere along the lines the models might have just gotten "online handle" and "minecraft content creator" conflated.

When Fable was accessible, I asked it about myself and it had some accurate information about me. It's neat. It feels a tiny bit like I got to sign the Voyager probe. I wonder if Fable was trained on a significantly different selection of data or if it's just better at retaining rare details it saw in its training.

GPT-5.5 tells me about the actor, but Claude Opus 4.8 and, weirdly, Grok 4.2 know who I am [1]. I wonder if that's because I use Claude more? Grok I have no clue why.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001293/

[1] https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/seth-green

https://www.intheweights.com/p/ken-shirriff

just to be clear, you have each search running on all those models? Self hosted a lot of them right?

(I'm asking seriously, as I can see some risk to having that linkage more public, but given the rate with which services holding PII are compromised and my own personal rate of receiving notices of "oops, we kinda sorta leaked everything about you, here, have more free credit monitoring", I assume almost all of this is available already.)

If you're worried about it use a VPN.

Your ISP anyway knows your IP or at the very least your current one if its dynamic.

(If it actually is your real name, then I can only assume you're using an iocaine powder strategy to beat the internet ...)

[1] (Yes, I know, it's a joke.)

So… what does this mean for the right to be forgotten?

In fact, both of the first two are me, but I wonder if Claude Opus 4.8 (the only one that hit both of those two) realizes they're the same person? :P

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newstargam...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newstargam...

  No tools are available. Do not imply that you searched, looked up, browsed, or verified anything externally. If the name is ambiguous, return distinct likely people or entities rather than blending them. Do not invent entries to fill the list. Return only JSON.

  Return fewer than 8 if fewer credible matches exist. Return {"results":[]} if you do not recognize any credible person or entity. Use this JSON shape:
  {
    "results": [
      {
        "rank": 1,
        "name": "Resolved person or entity name",
        "confidence": 0,
        "snippet": "Concise snippet supporting this result."
      }
    ]
  }

  Confidence is 0-100 for how strongly you recognize this specific person or entity. Snippet should be one short, complete search-result-style description (≤ 160 characters).

  The query is: Who is "<name>"?

American actor and rapper > 984 strength · Top 1%

MLB catcher for Dodgers > 255 strength · Top 25%

"No stable person found"...

If I have a strength of just 488, how can that put me in the top 10%! Anyways, fun idea.

For fucks sake.

I looked up the city and year cited by the model for my untimely demise, and it turns out the crime is real, but the real victim was a female sharing my last name, with a middle name loosely resembling my first.

There seems to be some top twenty that rank highly, probably in part due to them being in the files that can't be named!

Let's also make a match history page with all those soccer players. Generating the video will have to wait a few years.

My real name was attributed to a non-existent famous midfield footballer

I am, as far a I know the only person in the world with my name. So I searched for my name. I am none of many things this tool tells me I am, for example a right wing politician, a journalist,l and a researcher on solar fuels.

Maybe we should start a band?

er. okay. The good thing about this test is that I am the only person in the world with my full name, and I know all the people with my last name (about 30-ish people). None of us are ambassadors, none of us are related to Congo in any way.

…WTF!?

I scored 1,100 total on my music moniker. It has been used in SoundCloud and also via streaming services/releases via DistroKid. Represented in all the models but of course not disproportionally large fame so to speak. It’s just a very unique setup, somewhat designed to stand out.

My writing account, newer within the past few years, is just under 1,000. The Kimi and DeepSeek pick that up a lot more. I wonder if they train on Medium more than the others…

Thanks for sharing!

https://www.intheweights.com/p/reuven-swirsky

If I spell my name in Hebrew othography, it comes even closer

https://www.intheweights.com/p/~5e8~~5d0~~5d5~~5d1~~5df~-~5e...

But none are exactly right.

But unfortunately I'm not a professional footballer _or_ a fictional character in a Henry James novel (though I looked up the reference and it's close!)

Apparently it's fixed now. Surely you'll trust a random website...

All the data is still public. There are more than 104000 entries now.

The original name, that was searched, is also stored in the data (in another field; somehow I missed that before).

@tourtlesoup: Why don't you restrict the access and why don't you put a warning on your page?

Currently there are a bit more than 43000 entries. As far as I have seen, only the results are stored. When I entered a random name, only a similar name was found, and that similar name result was stored, but not the original input.

Even if this thing wasn't publicly displaying the names, I would assume they would be collecting them for something.

Can't trust anything like this online.

    David Titarenco
    Software engineer and open-source contributor

    340 strength · Top 20%

    GPT-5.5 says
    Software engineer and writer known for work
    on developer tools, systems, and programming-
    related articles.

    Claude Opus 4.8 says
    Software engineer and entrepreneur known for
    web/JavaScript development work and contributions
    to open-source projects and tech startup communities.

> Llama 3.2 1B says

> American actor, best known for his roles in films such as 'The Big Lebowski' and 'The Big Lebowski 2'.

Nailed it! /s

But even the entries that aren't marked as likely hallucinations are wrong for me on this site.

> George McBay

> African American chemist and educator

No, that's Henry Cecil McBay (no direct relation that I'm aware of).

Google Search's AI mode does match actual me, but the information it spits out is all mixed up with information on another person who has my same name (also no relation that I'm aware of) and is also a software developer.