Comment by svara

It's a bit of a skill. Gaining an incorrect understanding of some topic is a risk anyway you learn, and I don't feel it's greater with LLMs than many of the alternatives.

Sure, having access to legit experts who can tutor you privately on a range of topics would be better, but that's not realistic.

What I find is that if I need to explore some new domain within a field I'm broadly familiar with, just thinking through what the LLM is saying is sufficient for verification, since I can look for internal consistency and check against things I know already.

When exploring a new topic, often times my questions are superficial enough for me to be confident that the answers are very common in the training data.

When exploring a new topic that's also somewhat niche or goes into a lot of detail, I use the LLM first to get a broad overview and then drill down by asking for specific sources and using the LLM as an assistant to consume authoritative material.