5 ms·

> a reputable source News reporters and editors have their biases. Book authors have their biases. Scientists and research papers have their biases. Search eng

> a reputable source News reporters and editors have their biases. Book authors have their biases. Scientists and research papers have their biases. Search engines have their biases. Google too. All human-created systems have biases shaped by the environments, social norms, education, traditions, etc. of their creators and managers. So, the concepts of "objective truth" and "reputable" need to be analyzed more critically. They seem to be labels given to sources we have learned to trust by habit. Some people trust newspapers over TV. Some people trust some newspapers over other newspapers. All of it often on emotional grounds of agreeability with our own biases. Then we seem to post-rationalize this emotion of agreeability using terms like "objective truth" and "reputable". Is Google search engine that leads to NY Times or Fox News or Wikipedia and makes us manually choose sources as per our biases "better" than Google's Gemini engine that summarizes content from all the above sources and gives an average answer? (Note: "average answer" as of current versions; in future, its training too may be explicitly biased, like Grok and DeepSeek did). Perhaps we can start using terms like "human sources of information" versus "AI sources of information" and get rid of the contentious terms. Then critically analyze whether one set of sources is better than the other, or they complement each other.

Jensson 7mo ago
How does this answer the question: "how do you deal with people who trust LLMs?"? Nothing you are saying explains how to deal with such people.
- lovelearning 7mo ago
  I felt the question is based on some shaky assumptions that may lead to a poor answer. Since the OP trusts humans more by default, is it a problem if I point out those assumptions? Ask HN need not become another SO. I did explain the weaknesses of both LLMs and "reputable sources" and suggested people use them as complementary tools. I also suggested using the convenient self-fact-check feature of LLMs, something we can't do as easily with traditional sources.
  - Jensson 7mo ago
    > I did explain the weaknesses of both LLMs and "reputable sources" and suggested people use them as complementary tools. I also suggested using the convenient self-fact-check feature of LLMs, something we can't do as easily with traditional sources. That just explains how to find facts for yourself, not how to deal with a person who trust LLM outputs. So you still haven't answered the question. > Since the OP trusts humans more by default OP never said that. OP said there is a problem with people trusting LLM instead of doing proper research and finding good sources, you explaining how to do proper research and finding good sources doesn't have anything to do with the question.
    - lovelearning 7mo ago
      I gave suggestions that OP can pass on to the people they have to deal with. I didn't realize it has to be pointed out explicitly SO-style to some people. OP implies human sources are the "good sources" or "reputable sources." This kind of confusion is exactly why I suggested using better terms than "reputable sources" or in your case "good sources."
      - Jensson 7mo ago
        > OP implies human sources are the "good sources" or "reputable sources." No OP did not do that, nowhere did OP mention human sources. When I search the internet I don't just find human sources, I also find automatically generated data graphs and maps and such, those are also good sources of data. If I had to choose between a map from Google maps and a map from an LLM I'd trust the map from google maps any day.
        lovelearning 7mo ago
        > automatically generated data graphs Are you saying there are data graphs that don't have humans in the chain? If so, what came up with the data and the tools to generate those graphs? And how do you decide which data and graph to trust? What exactly makes them "good sources"? > If I had to choose between a map from Google maps I would too. But Google Maps relies on local 3d party survey companies that use people, manual GIS tools, and image recognition AI. How do you know they don't have any mistakes in them? In fact, I live in a country where local area names are frequently misspelled on Google Maps, and reverse geocoding gives misleading addresses. I feel my point that all these "reputable sources" or "good sources" have biases (and mistakes) still stands. I must also point out that the 3 concrete examples given against my replies all involved visual content like graphs, maps, Peanuts cartoons, etc. But my comments were written with the typical text-based usage for QA in mind. I don't know if LLMs can fact-check map imagery or data graphs (probably not, but I've never tried). It's just not the kind of thing I'd ever use LLMs for, to begin with.
menaerus 7mo ago
Great comment.
Kavelach 7mo ago
This is an insightful comment, but I feel like you omit the fact that LLMs often give out verifiably false information that can hurt the user or other people. It is true that this also happens on the Internet, but! When I encounter an article about a topic and it is clearly LLM generated, I can expect it doesn't contain much valuable information, only rehashes of what is already out there. On the other hand, when it is clearly written by a human, I can expect to learn something new, even though the author has some bias.
- menaerus 7mo ago
  It's wrong to assume incompetence, which is what you did to a comment which displays much deeper chain of thought about the subject. A more proper way of doing it would be to reflect over your own opinions and critically assess them, as the comment points that out. To be more specific, what makes you think that the person you're replying to is not aware that LLMs can give false information, and is not taking that into account?
- lovelearning 7mo ago
  You're right that LLMs do spit out false information or wrong knowledge. I've experienced them too. But a redeeming quality is that we can ask the same LLM to fact check its own answer step by step in real time with little effort. They often identify their own hallucinations and reduce the probability of retaining that mistake in the rest of the conversation. This isn't easy with human sources. The effort to fact check without LLMs or ask the sources to fact check themselves are both higher. So it's often not done at all. We also often ignore subtle but very common biases in human media sources [1], which create other types of errors like omissions and euphemisms which have been no less harmful than LLM hallucinations. The case of the Iraqi WMDs of Iraq and the NYT's dispersal of that disinfo, for example [2]. Regarding valuable information and rehashing, we probably shouldn't equate between all the things LLMs can do, and AI-generated articles. The quality of the latter may be entirely due to the lack of interest, attention, and cost concerns of whoever generated the article. Anecdotally, I have often found valuable knowledge and obscure connections by using deep research tools with careful prompts. Lastly, if you're frequently finding something new from human-written sources, and LLMs are being trained on most of those same sources, isn't it logical that the latter will also likely output that same information? This is why I feel human and AI sources are probably best used as complementary tools. Neither set of sources are perfect but each set has its strengths. By using both, we can get closer to an objective truth than using only one of them. [1]: https://gipplab.uni-goettingen.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/181122_mediabiasprocess-800x602.png https://gipplab.uni-goettingen.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/04... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublishing.usnews https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublis...
ndsipa_pomu 7mo ago
Whilst chasing after "objective truth" is a philosophical problem, it's clear that some statements are more correct and true than others. News articles are often biased, but most of the time, the bias is from the choice of what is reported and choosing specific language to push an interpretation (e.g. reporting road traffic collisions as "accidents" to downplay them or depersonalise them by stating "car hit tree" rather than "car driven into tree"). The problem with some LLM outputs is that it's not just bias, but clearly incorrect such as recommending putting glue onto pizzas.
- lovelearning 7mo ago
  I agree about how these biases happen. However, omission and downplaying can also be harmful just like hallucinations. One redeeming quality of LLMs is that we can ask the same LLM to fact check its previous answer and they do tend to correct most of their mistakes themselves. Something we can't do with media sources, and usually don't try either. LLMs along with existing sources can be good complementary tools for getting even closer to an objective truth than relying on either one by itself.
  - ndsipa_pomu 7mo ago
    I disagree as hallucinations can be drastically far more harmful or misleading than bias. The problem as I see it is that LLMs perform a type of lossy knowledge compression. Also, the data on which they're trained will typically be the biased articles, so they're unlikely to be any better and very likely worse as they will encode the biases. I don't really see LLMs as being complementary tools as they're more of a summation/averaging tool - like comparing an original painting with a heavily compressed JPEG of that painting. (Of course, having access to a huge library of JPEGs is often more useful than just owning a single painting)
Yizahi 7mo ago
Ironically, this is the classic bias of "bothsiding" the issue. When one side is clearly wrong, just sprinkle in some "look, the others are doing something bad, which means they are equally wrong". A basic lesson from the propaganda manual.
- lovelearning 7mo ago
  I know what you mean, and I realize some of the things I've written sound similar to what various rightwing commentators tend to say (e.g.: "concept of objective truth must be analyzed critically.") But my motive is very different. It's not to deny any kind of injustice or misinformation by hiding behind inherent uncertainties and bothsidesism. I'm not in favor of giving the benefit of the doubt to the powerful by default - that's already happening a lot under our current system of so-called "reputable sources." Instead, I'm saying that this kind of injustice masking and misinformation may also be present in the very sources that ethical people may have come to trust by habit. My suggestion is to use the power of LLMs as complementary tools to become even more rational and critical, in the direction of even better ethics and justice. I'm advocating for even more skepticism of the powerful, not less. I'm advocating the approach Betrand Russell recommended for acting under uncertainties, and feel LLMs can be useful complementary tools for doing just that. [1]: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.462628/page/n43/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.462628/page/n4...
basilikum 7mo ago
> Is Google search engine that leads to NY Times or Fox News or Wikipedia and makes us manually choose sources as per our biases "better" than Google's Gemini engine that summarizes content from all the above sources and gives an average answer? If you use just any amount of critical thinking, yes. Truth and objectivity are ideals, not practical states. LLMs are a very bad way to come close to this ideal. You may use them as a search interface to give you sources and then examine the sources, but the output directly is a strict degeneration over primary or secondary sources that you judge critically.
- lovelearning 7mo ago
  > LLMs are a very bad way to come close to this ideal...the output directly is a strict degeneration I didn't understand the second part but regarding the first... For me, LLMs are just another source of information with a different UI, analogous to newspapers, TV documentaries, Wikipedia, Google search, YT talks/documentaries, even the majority of informational non-fiction books, and research papers. Some may consider some subset of these as reputable sources. But in my mind, the same faculties of skepticism, cynicism, distrust, and benefit-of-the-doubt calculus are activated for all of them, including LLM outputs. So that's one possible answer to your question. But I suggest communicating this through simple illustrative examples to help your target audience understand the problem. Abstract terms like primary sources, secondary sources, reputable sources, objective truth, strict degeneration, etc. may not help, especially if they have time or other constraints that make frequent critical examination of sources impractical.
  - Jensson 7mo ago
    > For me, LLMs are just another source of information with a different UI, analogous to newspapers, TV documentaries, Wikipedia, Google search, YT talks/documentaries, even the majority of informational non-fiction books, and research papers. LLM just distils information from those sources and is therefore always a second hand source at best, and a liar at worst. Humans can collect real world data and write about their findings, LLM cannot do that, that makes LLM strictly worse than the best human sources.
andor 7mo ago
> Is Google search engine that leads to NY Times or Fox News or Wikipedia and makes us manually choose sources as per our biases "better" than Google's Gemini engine that summarizes content from all the above sources and gives an average answer? That's not what Google's AI mode does, though. It presents a bunch of sources along the answer, but in my experience, the sources in many cases don't actually back up the claims generated by the LLM.

Jensson 7mo ago

How does this answer the question: "how do you deal with people who trust LLMs?"? Nothing you are saying explains how to deal with such people.

lovelearning 7mo ago
I felt the question is based on some shaky assumptions that may lead to a poor answer. Since the OP trusts humans more by default, is it a problem if I point out those assumptions? Ask HN need not become another SO. I did explain the weaknesses of both LLMs and "reputable sources" and suggested people use them as complementary tools. I also suggested using the convenient self-fact-check feature of LLMs, something we can't do as easily with traditional sources.
- Jensson 7mo ago
  > I did explain the weaknesses of both LLMs and "reputable sources" and suggested people use them as complementary tools. I also suggested using the convenient self-fact-check feature of LLMs, something we can't do as easily with traditional sources. That just explains how to find facts for yourself, not how to deal with a person who trust LLM outputs. So you still haven't answered the question. > Since the OP trusts humans more by default OP never said that. OP said there is a problem with people trusting LLM instead of doing proper research and finding good sources, you explaining how to do proper research and finding good sources doesn't have anything to do with the question.
  - lovelearning 7mo ago
    I gave suggestions that OP can pass on to the people they have to deal with. I didn't realize it has to be pointed out explicitly SO-style to some people. OP implies human sources are the "good sources" or "reputable sources." This kind of confusion is exactly why I suggested using better terms than "reputable sources" or in your case "good sources."
    - Jensson 7mo ago
      > OP implies human sources are the "good sources" or "reputable sources." No OP did not do that, nowhere did OP mention human sources. When I search the internet I don't just find human sources, I also find automatically generated data graphs and maps and such, those are also good sources of data. If I had to choose between a map from Google maps and a map from an LLM I'd trust the map from google maps any day.
      - lovelearning 7mo ago
        > automatically generated data graphs Are you saying there are data graphs that don't have humans in the chain? If so, what came up with the data and the tools to generate those graphs? And how do you decide which data and graph to trust? What exactly makes them "good sources"? > If I had to choose between a map from Google maps I would too. But Google Maps relies on local 3d party survey companies that use people, manual GIS tools, and image recognition AI. How do you know they don't have any mistakes in them? In fact, I live in a country where local area names are frequently misspelled on Google Maps, and reverse geocoding gives misleading addresses. I feel my point that all these "reputable sources" or "good sources" have biases (and mistakes) still stands. I must also point out that the 3 concrete examples given against my replies all involved visual content like graphs, maps, Peanuts cartoons, etc. But my comments were written with the typical text-based usage for QA in mind. I don't know if LLMs can fact-check map imagery or data graphs (probably not, but I've never tried). It's just not the kind of thing I'd ever use LLMs for, to begin with.

menaerus 7mo ago

Great comment.

Kavelach 7mo ago

This is an insightful comment, but I feel like you omit the fact that LLMs often give out verifiably false information that can hurt the user or other people. It is true that this also happens on the Internet, but! When I encounter an article about a topic and it is clearly LLM generated, I can expect it doesn't contain much valuable information, only rehashes of what is already out there. On the other hand, when it is clearly written by a human, I can expect to learn something new, even though the author has some bias.

menaerus 7mo ago
It's wrong to assume incompetence, which is what you did to a comment which displays much deeper chain of thought about the subject. A more proper way of doing it would be to reflect over your own opinions and critically assess them, as the comment points that out. To be more specific, what makes you think that the person you're replying to is not aware that LLMs can give false information, and is not taking that into account?
lovelearning 7mo ago
You're right that LLMs do spit out false information or wrong knowledge. I've experienced them too. But a redeeming quality is that we can ask the same LLM to fact check its own answer step by step in real time with little effort. They often identify their own hallucinations and reduce the probability of retaining that mistake in the rest of the conversation. This isn't easy with human sources. The effort to fact check without LLMs or ask the sources to fact check themselves are both higher. So it's often not done at all. We also often ignore subtle but very common biases in human media sources [1], which create other types of errors like omissions and euphemisms which have been no less harmful than LLM hallucinations. The case of the Iraqi WMDs of Iraq and the NYT's dispersal of that disinfo, for example [2]. Regarding valuable information and rehashing, we probably shouldn't equate between all the things LLMs can do, and AI-generated articles. The quality of the latter may be entirely due to the lack of interest, attention, and cost concerns of whoever generated the article. Anecdotally, I have often found valuable knowledge and obscure connections by using deep research tools with careful prompts. Lastly, if you're frequently finding something new from human-written sources, and LLMs are being trained on most of those same sources, isn't it logical that the latter will also likely output that same information? This is why I feel human and AI sources are probably best used as complementary tools. Neither set of sources are perfect but each set has its strengths. By using both, we can get closer to an objective truth than using only one of them. [1]: https://gipplab.uni-goettingen.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/181122_mediabiasprocess-800x602.png https://gipplab.uni-goettingen.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/04... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublishing.usnews https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/may/26/pressandpublis...

ndsipa_pomu 7mo ago

Whilst chasing after "objective truth" is a philosophical problem, it's clear that some statements are more correct and true than others. News articles are often biased, but most of the time, the bias is from the choice of what is reported and choosing specific language to push an interpretation (e.g. reporting road traffic collisions as "accidents" to downplay them or depersonalise them by stating "car hit tree" rather than "car driven into tree"). The problem with some LLM outputs is that it's not just bias, but clearly incorrect such as recommending putting glue onto pizzas.

lovelearning 7mo ago
I agree about how these biases happen. However, omission and downplaying can also be harmful just like hallucinations. One redeeming quality of LLMs is that we can ask the same LLM to fact check its previous answer and they do tend to correct most of their mistakes themselves. Something we can't do with media sources, and usually don't try either. LLMs along with existing sources can be good complementary tools for getting even closer to an objective truth than relying on either one by itself.
- ndsipa_pomu 7mo ago
  I disagree as hallucinations can be drastically far more harmful or misleading than bias. The problem as I see it is that LLMs perform a type of lossy knowledge compression. Also, the data on which they're trained will typically be the biased articles, so they're unlikely to be any better and very likely worse as they will encode the biases. I don't really see LLMs as being complementary tools as they're more of a summation/averaging tool - like comparing an original painting with a heavily compressed JPEG of that painting. (Of course, having access to a huge library of JPEGs is often more useful than just owning a single painting)

Yizahi 7mo ago

Ironically, this is the classic bias of "bothsiding" the issue. When one side is clearly wrong, just sprinkle in some "look, the others are doing something bad, which means they are equally wrong". A basic lesson from the propaganda manual.

lovelearning 7mo ago
I know what you mean, and I realize some of the things I've written sound similar to what various rightwing commentators tend to say (e.g.: "concept of objective truth must be analyzed critically.") But my motive is very different. It's not to deny any kind of injustice or misinformation by hiding behind inherent uncertainties and bothsidesism. I'm not in favor of giving the benefit of the doubt to the powerful by default - that's already happening a lot under our current system of so-called "reputable sources." Instead, I'm saying that this kind of injustice masking and misinformation may also be present in the very sources that ethical people may have come to trust by habit. My suggestion is to use the power of LLMs as complementary tools to become even more rational and critical, in the direction of even better ethics and justice. I'm advocating for even more skepticism of the powerful, not less. I'm advocating the approach Betrand Russell recommended for acting under uncertainties, and feel LLMs can be useful complementary tools for doing just that. [1]: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.462628/page/n43/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.462628/page/n4...

basilikum 7mo ago

> Is Google search engine that leads to NY Times or Fox News or Wikipedia and makes us manually choose sources as per our biases "better" than Google's Gemini engine that summarizes content from all the above sources and gives an average answer? If you use just any amount of critical thinking, yes. Truth and objectivity are ideals, not practical states. LLMs are a very bad way to come close to this ideal. You may use them as a search interface to give you sources and then examine the sources, but the output directly is a strict degeneration over primary or secondary sources that you judge critically.

lovelearning 7mo ago
> LLMs are a very bad way to come close to this ideal...the output directly is a strict degeneration I didn't understand the second part but regarding the first... For me, LLMs are just another source of information with a different UI, analogous to newspapers, TV documentaries, Wikipedia, Google search, YT talks/documentaries, even the majority of informational non-fiction books, and research papers. Some may consider some subset of these as reputable sources. But in my mind, the same faculties of skepticism, cynicism, distrust, and benefit-of-the-doubt calculus are activated for all of them, including LLM outputs. So that's one possible answer to your question. But I suggest communicating this through simple illustrative examples to help your target audience understand the problem. Abstract terms like primary sources, secondary sources, reputable sources, objective truth, strict degeneration, etc. may not help, especially if they have time or other constraints that make frequent critical examination of sources impractical.
- Jensson 7mo ago
  > For me, LLMs are just another source of information with a different UI, analogous to newspapers, TV documentaries, Wikipedia, Google search, YT talks/documentaries, even the majority of informational non-fiction books, and research papers. LLM just distils information from those sources and is therefore always a second hand source at best, and a liar at worst. Humans can collect real world data and write about their findings, LLM cannot do that, that makes LLM strictly worse than the best human sources.

andor 7mo ago

> Is Google search engine that leads to NY Times or Fox News or Wikipedia and makes us manually choose sources as per our biases "better" than Google's Gemini engine that summarizes content from all the above sources and gives an average answer? That's not what Google's AI mode does, though. It presents a bunch of sources along the answer, but in my experience, the sources in many cases don't actually back up the claims generated by the LLM.