[daedalus_j]

LLM's hallucinate so often when I ask them about software development issues that I don't even bother to ask them about areas I'm unfamiliar with.

I think the major difference that makes in not just "elite preference" is that the LLM output is just confidently wrong. If I read a report from an elite institution I'm at least reasonably confident that they're not going to base their entire argument on the premise that 2+2=5. Someone is going to call them on it, there may be reputational damage, there may even be legal repercussions in certain cases.

LLMs have no such protections. GPT recently, when asked to "write a function using the ELixir programming language that..." wrote a function in Elixir syntax using Python libraries and function names. That's a class of error that makes it actually dangerous if you're asking it about anything you can't fully check on your own, and there's no checks-and-balances for the content it generates that's only ever visible to a single user.

I agree with you that "official" sources can't be trusted and there are inaccuracies everywhere, but you have to admit that the craziest sources who say the craziest things (flat-earthers and such for example) get pretty easily dismissed and everything else they say becomes suspect. LLM's bypass that and can say the most outrageous things without ever getting caught or being forced to make a retraction/correction. That feels like a problem worth worrying about.