Off My Chest
RULES:
I am looking for mods!
1. The "good" part of our community means we are pro-empathy and anti-harassment. However, we don't intend to make this a "safe space" where everyone has to be a saint. Sh*t happens, and life is messy. That's why we get things off our chests.
2. Bigotry is not allowed. That includes racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and religiophobia. (If you want to vent about religion, that's fine; but religion is not inherently evil.)
3. Frustrated, venting, or angry posts are still welcome.
4. Posts and comments that bait, threaten, or incite harassment are not allowed.
5. If anyone offers mental, medical, or professional advice here, please remember to take it with a grain of salt. Seek out real professionals if needed.
6. Please put NSFW behind NSFW tags.
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Superficially. But Google (or "the Internet") and Wikipedia were criticized because they are very easily accessible and not curated/high quality enough, not because the technology is inherently untrustworthy. LLMs on the other hand are marketed as thinking machines and they just aren't.
I don't know about where you were taught, but we were taught that Wikipedia was unreliable because anyone could edit it. Google wasn't untrustworthy because it was an aggregator - it was the aggregation that was untrustworthy because anyone could publish anything. You couldn't verify sources from a blog post that didn't supply any.
I think it's all the same gambit. You ether know you need to follow up with more research, sources, and citations, or you don't.
I'm trying to get at the difference between regular websites/search engines and LLMs.
Websites and search engines are about storing and retrieving information. Nothing wrong with that inherently, but yeah, people can write nonsense. Same with books and libraries, except that it's much easier to store and retrieve data. It's just a medium used by people and people can be untrustworthy.
LLMs don't store/retrieve, they aren't just another medium. In a way it's the whole Internet except with lossy compression. Sometimes you get good output, sometimes you get nonsense that sounds convincing enough. I'd trust that about as far as 4chan.