[macNchz]

I’ve seen this discussion many times over the past year and have come to think that the disconnect basically arises from the way that we have thousands of years of heuristics built up for interpreting the trustworthiness of what another human is telling us, 30 years of evaluating websites, and less than a year of evaluating LLM outputs.

People have some sense that someone giving them information may be an {expert, charlatan, idiot}, or that a website they’re looking at is run by a university vs a blogspam content farm, but many have not developed a sense for when or how much they can trust LLM output, which is delivered with the same tone and confidence regardless of whether it’s entirely fabricated.

There is probably a component of personality involved in how people approach this. Collectively we are all learning how to interact with this new source of information and people take varying paths.

[ghaff]

Exactly. Whether it's a person, a website, or a book, we have a ton of cues that give us some sort of intuitive reliability score. That reliability is essentially never going to be 100%. But, especially if we cross-check sources, we can start to have very high confidence that an answer is true--at least as far as anyone knows. (Or even that no one really knows the answer with any certainty.)

I've had ChatGPT return very serviceable "true" results and I've had ChatGPT return utter fiction.