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by dingnuts 415 days ago
Copilot is not a source. Find where it got that number or don't post. Seriously. It's actively harmful to cite a language model. Would you cite Autocorrect?
1 comments

It's a tool like any other. Get used to it.
It's a tool, not a source of empirically valid data. No one's going to 'get used' to LLMs being cited as sources of factual information any more than they'd complacently accept someone's Monte Carlo simulation or a hypothetical thought experiment being cited for the same purpose.
Additionally, outputs from LLMs can vary by user or prompt, making the data unreliable without clear sourcing or context.
If you said you Google’d it, we’d still ask for a source.
The thing I find amusing is that if I hadn't mentioned Copilot, no one would have batted an eyelash!
If you claimed that your source was The Onion, you’d get similar responses. You can make a claim, with no source, and expect the traditional answers. When your source is a “known to produce crap” source, what would you expect to hear?