Comment by nicole_express
15 hours ago
It's an odd thing here, because I don't really understand why this is LLM-specific at all. If someone came up to me and asked "who's the 6 Nimmt world champion?" I'd google it and probably find the same result, and have no reason not to believe it. I mean, for all I know the game is being made up too, though it has more sources at least.
It is not LLM specific. The conclusion of the post states
> The web was already being poisoned for search and link ranking long before LLMs existed.
But it continues
> We are now plugging generative models directly into that poisoned pipeline and asking them to reason confidently about “truth” on our behalf.
So it's a shift from trust Google to trust the AI, which might be more insidious or not, depends on the individual attitude of each of us.
It's a shift but it's a little worse. Checking/auditing search results is easier and more ingrained; even if many people don't do it, everyone has been hit by spam at some point, everyone knows it exists.
LLMs are the same thing but have an air of authority about them that a web search lacks, at least for now.
I listen to a podcast. The hosts are not tech people. They don't know much about AI, but they play around with it to the extent that most people do. They're both media professionals with long careers in radio news. They closely follow the news, and are very aware of how LLMs hallucinate (and have experienced it themselves).
Recently one of them asked Gemini a very detailed question about some specific baseball stats and was exclaiming over the quality of the information he got back and how it would have been impossible or at least extremely difficult to find the information via a traditional search.
It wasn't until his cohost asked if he had verified the information that be realized no, he hadn't, he had just immediately taken it at face value.
I recognize this is a single anecdote, but I think it illustrates that there is a tendency to trust what an LLM gives you, when it's stated so factually and with so much detail -- even if you should know better.
To me that's the opposite. Whatever an LLM gives me, I view with skepticism. If I google sth then I quickly get a sense of how much I can trust it and what the BS factor is. I can refine my view in either case, but my a priori trust with an LLM is much lower.
Maybe we just need to work on training the general population to have a similar bias. (It will be harder than it sounds. Unbelievable amounts of capital are being bet on this not happening.)
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The difference imo is removing the information from the source. Previously you'd use the source of the information to gauge how much you trust it. If it's a reddit post or a no name website you'd likely be skeptical if it doesn't seem backed up by better sources. But now the info is coming from an LLM that you generally trust to be knowledgeable. And the language it uses backs up this feeling.
The OP post is highlighting how incredibly easy it is for a very small amount of information on the web to completely dictate the output of the LLM in to saying whatever you want.
> But now the info is coming from an LLM that you generally trust
But it's not from the LLM, the LLM clearly cites the wikipedia article as its source. This is just performing an internet search with extra steps, and ending up with misinformation because somebody vandalized wikipedia.
It's not. He vandalised wikipedia and then talked about LLMs in his writeup to gain attention.
> I'd google it and probably find the same result, and have no reason not to believe it.
Have you truly looked at the website?
https://6nimmt.com
I’d say there’s obvious reason to not believe it, or at least check another source. The website just seems fishy. Why would a website exist for just that one post? Sure, they could’ve made the website more believable, but that takes more effort and has more chances for something to jump out at you.
And therein lies a major difference between searching the web and asking an LLM. When doing the former, you can pick up on clues regarding what to trust. For example, a website you’ve visited often and has proven reliable will be more trustworthy to you than one you’ve never been to before. When asking an LLM, every piece of information is provided in the same interface, with the same authoritative certainty. You lose a major important signal.
A lot of people seem to think this to be an LLM problem, but you're right.
This is a general epistemological problem with relying on the Internet (or really, any piece of literature) as a source of truth
The LLM part of the "new" problem is the speed at which it can proliferate and the trust people seem to have in AI answers. Idk
Because outside of the tech community (in fact, many even inside of it), almost 100% of the folks consider what these chatgpt like tools answer as the truth without questioning it, or cross-verifying it even once.
In that case most of the mitigations listed by the author don't help though (e.g. surfacing the source). That's also no different than traditional works with citations (be it Youtube videos or peer-reviewed academic papers), where anybody rarely verifies what's written in the cited sources.
The only real alternatives would be:
- Kicking off a deep research-like investigation for each simple query
- Introducing a trusted middleman for sources, significantly cutting down the available information (e.g. restricting Wikipedia to locked-down/moderated pages)
- Not having any information at all, as at some point you can rarely every verify anything depending on how hard your definition of "verify" is
You would also find other results (this assumes what you're searching for is not a random made up thing). The issue with LLMs is IMHO bigger because it will give you answers as a matter of fact without any other consideration.
Closed it after “This house of cards only needs a $12 domain!”, right under “Sorry, Wikipedia.”, right under their Wikipedia edit.
It's also clearly AI generated writing. That doesn't help its credibility or interest. I'm extremely suspicious of people who use AI to write an ostensibly personal blog, for all the usual obvious reasons.
What are you basing that on? I'm usually pretty good at sniffing out AI writing, and it smells human to me.
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