What's interesting about this is not that parts it got wrong, but the parts it got right. The cacophony problem is still with us. With engagement-oriented soci

What's interesting about this is not that parts it got wrong, but the parts it got right. The cacophony problem is still with us. With engagement-oriented social media, it's worse since extreme voices tend to get amplified where they might previously have been drowned out by all the noise. Search engines were great for a while, and often remain quite good; I can instantly get the date for the battle of Trafalger, and I trust that the answer DuckDuckGo provided by way of Wikipedia is correct. Few people would put up a web page to lie about that. LLMs, however eagerly lie about simple, uncontroversial facts. I asked a local copy of the Mistral 7b LLM for the date of the battle of Trafalger and got three different answers, all wrong. Both interacting directly with LLMs and search engines finding LLM-generated content are likely to further reduce our ability to quickly and reliably find facts online.