[AmericanChopper]

> There is no alternative to this idea.

I said do your thinking for you, not do your information gathering for you.

I would suggest that you do not trust any single source to only ever tell you things that are true. If there’s a topic you want to know something about it’s a much better course of action to look at multiple different sources, and do your own thinking to come to your own conclusions.

There are no authorities who can reliably take on this role for you, and LLMs don’t change this. The same is true with science. Even prior to LLMs, the replication crisis should have shown that a single paper on any topic can’t be relied on to contain any truth (the same would be true even in the absence of a replication crisis for that matter).

[tsimionescu]

Oh, then I misunderstood. I thought you were against the notion of trusting a source for information, at all.

I very much agree with your actual point - that no source should be trusted absolutely, and that the only way to get a decent-to-solid idea on a topic is to consume multiple sources on that topic.

However, the problem is that even then people have relatively little time. It's important to have sources that one can rely on to be relatively accurate with a high probability, to get some vague idea about a topic you're not deeply invested in, but do care about somewhat. And I think this is where LLMs can hurt the most.