[skywhopper]

This is incredibly simplistic. Search engine results give a lot of context clues about the reliability of their asserted facts and provide a potential spectrum of answers. LLM-generated answers strip all that away, and give a single authoritatively phrased answer. Even if you’re inclined to disbelieve it, the LLM answer gives you no ability to dig in, refine, or compare. It just is. If you ask a chatbot if it’s sure, it might double down, or apologize and then repeat itself, or say it was right and give a contradictory followup.

Traditional pre-spam-overload Google results could often give a high quality answer, or if not, you’d at least get the sense of the low quality. Not so with LLMs.

[duxup]

I think you overestimate people’s ability to sniff out bad data on the internet.

Also are you suggesting people fact check an AI by asking it if it is correct? That seems absurd.

[dotnet00]

Pre-LLM madness, most decent scientists were capable of judging the reliability of a source, at least to an extent. Eg if the source is a paper in a decent journal, it probably has at least some substance to it and the basic facts are probably not wrong, if the paper is a zero-citation paper on vixra where none of the authors have any reasonable history, you'll probably have to check everything.

[threeseed]

But you could trust certain websites being more accurate than others based on their brand, the author, the other content the site had published, who they are linking to and people linking to them etc.

LLMs remove that ability to be discerning about what to trust.