[casenmgreen]

I looked to see if I could find anything asserting 1984 was about propaganda at BBC - nothing.

I found no interviews, no recordings - it seems what survives are his notebooks.

Can you describe the basis for the claim?

[nialv7]

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

[casenmgreen]

"As only Orwell could, he marked the BBC as he left – almost prissily: ‘I feel that I have been treated with the greatest generosity and allowed very great latitude…on no occasion have I been compelled to say on air anything that I would not say as a private individual.’"

That page does not seem to support the claim that 1984 is about or relates to his time at BBC.

[Spooky23]

Dig deeper. Orwell was a child of the empire, born in Bengal and served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. His service affected him deeply.

He wrote of it, and in some ways his writing on those times is better than his fiction.

[protocolture]

Its definitely an element, but it also mirrors some experiences in spain and ripping off Zamyatin's "We".

Like if you take Zamyatin's "We", and make the main character a propagandist working for the government, you get 1984.

[casenmgreen]

I found 1984 much more bleak and awful than We.

[MrSkelter]

The idea 1984 is about Russia would have surprised people at the time. That’s an ironic twist of history Orwell could have written about himself.

[darepublic]

Maybe they are getting 1984 confused with animal farm?

[JKCalhoun]

The recent HN front-page post linked to Asimov's review of 1984—Asimov claimed it was Stalinism through and through (writing the review in 1980, FWIW).

[Kim_Bruning]

So asking an LLM to work from memory will get you the general vibe of the thing from sources. The vibe as a vibe is actually very useful! It's a new variant of counting google hits for a term. But it doesn't really tell you more than that; and you can't treat it as fact.

Same as with a smart person working from memory. They're smart, and their memory is good, but they could misremember after all. [1]

If you ask your LLM to execute a search for you, congrats, you're one step further, now it can summarize the search results for you. But now you're back at the point you were before LLMs existed and we all relied on google. Just because google says something, doesn't mean it's true.

Now both you and the LLM need to go work through the sources and figure out what's actually going on.

The "ChatGPT says it's clearly absurd..." is missing the word "...because..." , and roughly a paragraph of support

[1] (Before you complain: I'm not anthropomorphizing. You're anthropocentrizing! )

[hananova]

If I wanted to know what ChatGPT says, I’m more than capable of asking it myself thank you.

[gspr]

I don't think anyone minds if you use an LLM to try to track down information like this. But the LLM's output is not what we want. That's merely a clue for you on your quest to find a proper source.

Even school children in the 90s were told that "the search engine" was ludicrous to give as a source. You should know that your LLM is the same.