4 ms·
> when people cite an LLM and just assume it’s correct. people used to say the exact same thing with wikipedia back when it first started.
by chii 2y ago
> when people cite an LLM and just assume it’s correct.
people used to say the exact same thing with wikipedia back when it first started.
- sandeepkd 2y agoAnd that is still accurate today. Information always contains a bias from the narrators perspective. Having multiple sources allows one to triangulate the accuracy of information. Making people use one source of information would allow the business to control the entire narrative. Its just more of a business around people and sentiments than being bullish on science.
- nunez 2y agoCorrect; Wikipedia is still not authoritative.
- wwweston 2y agoWikipedia will cite and often broadly source. Wikipedia has an auditable decision trail for content conflicts. It behaves more like an accountable mediator of authority. Perhaps LLMs offering those (among other) features would be reasonably matched in a authorativity comparison.
- trashtester 2y agoAuthority, yes, accountable, not so much. Basically at the level of other publishers, meaning they can be as biased as MSNBC or Fox News, depending on who controls them.
- kragen 2y agoThese are not similar. Wikipedia says the same thing to everybody, and when what it says is wrong, anybody can correct it, and they do. Consequently it's always been fairly reliable.
- mjevans 2y agoCitation Needed - you can track down WHY it's reliable too if the stakes are high enough or the data seems iffy.
- kragen 2y agoThat's true too, but the bigger difference from my point of view is that factual errors in Wikipedia are relatively uncommon, while, in the LLM output I've been able to generate, factual errors vastly outnumber correct facts. LLMs are fantastic at creativity and language translation but terrible at saying true things instead of false things.
- gonzobonzo 2y ago> Consequently it's always been fairly reliable. Comments like these honestly make me much more concerned than LLM hallucinations. There have been numerous times when I've tracked down the source for a claim, only to find that the source was saying something different, or that the source was completely unreliable (sometimes on the crackpot level). Currently, there's a much greater understanding that LLM's are unreliable. Whereas I often see people treat Wikipedia, posts on AskHistorians, YouTube videos, studies from advocacy groups, and other questionable sources as if they can be relied on. The big problem is that people in general are terrible at exercising critical thinking when they're presented with information. It's probably less of an issue with LLMs at the moment, since they're new technology and a certain amount of skepticism gets applied to their output. But the issue is that once people have gotten more used to them, they'll turn off they're critical thinking in the same manner that they turn it off when absorbing information from other sources that they're used to.
- camgunz 2y agoThe sell of Wikipedia was never "we'll think so you don't have to", it was never going to disarm you of your skepticism and critical thought, and you can actually check the sources. LLMs are sold as "replace knowledge work(ers)", you cannot check their sources, and the only way you can check their work is by going to something like Wikipedia. They're just fundamentally different things.
- mdp2021 2y agoAnd they were right, right? They recognized it had structural faults that made it possible for bad data to sip in. The same is valid for LLMs: they have structural faults. So what is your point? You seem to have placed assumptions there. And broad ones, so that differences between the two things, and complexities, the important details, do not appear.