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I do this all the time. It's shocking how well it works. A year or two ago suggesting that someone use LLMs for fact checking would get you laughed out of a roo
by simonw 15d ago
I do this all the time. It's shocking how well it works. A year or two ago suggesting that someone use LLMs for fact checking would get you laughed out of a room, but today the good ones (Fable, GPT-5.6/6) with a search tool enabled are genuinely excellent at this.
They can even retrieve articles you link to and check that you aren't misrepresenting them.
- benoau 14d agoI do something like this with code all the time, “is this idiomatic <foo>?”, I find it very helpful.
- geraneum 14d agoThis is bad advice for anything serious that can be subtly wrong. I’ve had Fable being consequentially wrong about what a certain, rather small, code block does in our codebase. Not even on something very complex which wasted a lot of time and effort from the team until we checked the code ourselves. I think these tools are still useful and one should learn to use them but blind trust for anything of importance is misguided IMO.
- dist-epoch 14d agoTo paraphrase, "if a junior programmer doesn't understand what your code does, it's bad". If Fable doesn't understand, well...
- geraneum 14d agoDid you just paraphrase yourself in quotation marks?
- simonw 14d agoYou don't blind trust them in the fact checking. You check what they point out.
- nozzlegear 12d agoFact check the fact checker!
- black_knight 13d agoI use Fable to give me feedback on things I write. But I discard about 50%, because it often does not have the context and thus tends to favour hedging stuff. Also, it does not always vibe with my writing style. But the 50% I do take into account, improves the text! And, like TFA, I never ask it for concrete text. It only helps me diagnose the issues, I prescribe the medicine!