[Trixter]

This is missing the broad concern with hallucination: You are putting your trust in something that delivers all results confidently, even if they were predicted incorrectly. Your counter-argument is lack of trust in other sources (podcasts, the education system), however humans, when they don't know something, generally say they don't know something, whereas LLMs will confidently output incorrect information. Knowing nothing about a certain subject, and (for the sake of argument) lacking research access, I would much rather trust a podcast specializing in a certain area than asking a LLM.

Put more simply: I would rather have no information than incorrect information.

I work in a field of tech history that is under-represented on wikipedia, but represented well in other areas on the internet and the web. It is incredibly easy to get chatGPT to hallucinate information and give incorrect answers when asking very basic questions about this field, whereas this field is talked about and covered quite accurately from the early days of usenet all the way up to modern social media. Until the quality of training data can be improved, I can never use chatgpt for anything relating to this field, as I cannot trust its output.

[WendyTheWillow]

I am continually surprised by how many people struggle to operate in uncertainty; I am further surprised by how many people seem to delude themselves into thinking that… podcasts… can provide a level of certainty that an LLM cannot.

In life, you exceptionally rarely have “enough” information to make a decision at the critical moment. You would rather know nothing than know some things? That’s not how the world works, not how discovery works, and not even how knowledge works. The things you think are certain are a lot less so than you apparently believe.