[mitthrowaway2]

After some experience and testing, I've become well aware not to use LLMs to ask questions like "who did X" and "what is company Y's policy about Z", because they tend to hallucinate responses (even for well-known people).

What I've not yet figured out how to deal with is how to handle being surrounded by a society of people who go ahead and trust LLMs for their factual answers anyway. I think even if I'm careful about selecting my sources, the background noise floor is going to climb up to the point that there's no signal-to-noise ratio left.

[Thorentis]

People used to criticise Wikipedia for being bad due to being crowdsourced (at least in school they did). Now, Wikipedia looks like one of the best antidotes to LLMs.

[rixed]

Technically, I see no reason why Wikipedia would stay immune very much longer, unfortunately.

The best antidote is printed books.

[nitwit005]

I suspect this is more of a case of garbage-in garbage-out. The existing web results have invented answers.

People created websites to "answer" people's search queries about celebrity net worth, if some celebrity is gay, if they are in a relationship, etc. They obviously frequently did not know, and made a guess, or relied on tabloids as a source, who also frequently make things up.

[milesrout]

Yes but it is quite obvious that you are on a site like that so you can ignore it. How am I meant to know if ChatGPT was trained on those websites? How do I know when it is effectively drawing from that vs drawing from a reliable source?

[nitwit005]

It seems you already know the answer to that, which is that you don't.