Comment by keeda

1 hour ago

Makes sense, but it seems to me that the ability to launder disinformation is more a function of the trust people put in LLMs than any inherent property of their own. As some other comments indicate, this also was and is a problem with Wikipedia. It's possible trust in LLMs will follow the same trajectory as trust in Wikipedia, which seems to have been pretty non-linear (like, we rarely see "Do not cite Wikipedia" anymore.)

I think eventually things would settle on an approach similar to your example of the links: look at multiple sources and arrive at a balanced overview that includes the trust level and biases of each sources. I think the pieces are in place, just need to be put together. E.g. already AI overviews (especially on Amazon product reviews) are essentially of the form "Some say A but others say B" which has the benefit of a) clearly being second-hand information, and b) not sounding so authoritative, letting readers draw their own conclusions.

I agree with your assessment or hopes. The interesting thing is that I get the idea the average user basically grokked, in 2008, that Google itself can't answer a question for you, it can only show you a list of websites that match keywords and you have to do the work to vet them, and often to extract the answers themselves from webpages.

Today they seem to not grok (no pun intended, just think the word is fitting) that AI isn't an oracle and as such, its "opinion" on anything that could be even slightly controversial carries zero weight.