Comment by Ekaros
6 days ago
I think "I googled this" can be valid and helpful contribution. For example looking up some statistic or fact or an year. If that is also verified and sanity checked.
6 days ago
I think "I googled this" can be valid and helpful contribution. For example looking up some statistic or fact or an year. If that is also verified and sanity checked.
Yes, while citing an LLM in the same way is probably not as useful.
"I googled this" is only helpful when the statistic or fact they looked up was correct and well-sourced. When it's a reddit comment, you derail into a new argument about strength of sources.
The LLM skips a step, and gets you right to the "unusable source" argument.
I agree. Telling I googled this and someone has this opinion is pretty useless. Be that someone a LLM or random poster on internet.
Still, I will fight that someone actually doing the leg work even by search engine and reasonable evaluation on a few sources is often quite valuable contribution. Sometimes even if it is done to discredit someone else.
"I googled this" usually means actually going into a page and seeing what it says, not just copy-pasting the search results page itself, which is the equivalent here.
In that case, the correct post here would be to say “here’s the stat” and cite the actual source (not “I googled it”), and then add some additional commentary.