[latexr]

> I welcome your feedback, and any code amendments you propose to improve the tool. You clearly understand what makes good research and your contributions will be highly valued by all of us.

This bit is worded in a way that feels manipulative. Perhaps it’s why your comment is being downvoted. Regardless, I’ll give you the befit of the doubt and believe you’re being honest and replying in good faith; my genuine intentions have been misinterpreted in the past too, and I don’t wish to do it to another.

I won’t propose any code improvements, because I don’t believe projects like yours are positive to the world. On the contrary, this over-reliance on LLMs and taking their output as gospel will leave us all worse off. What we need is the exact opposite, for people to be actively aware of the inherent flaws in the system and internalise the absolute need to verify.

[nickwatson]

I'd like to humor you a bit on what you say (going off on a little tangent here).

- Were all the existing sources (e.g. news, podcasts, etc) ever reliable? - Do people lobby for certain outcomes on some research/articles?

And finally...

- Now we know LLMs hallucinate, and news can easily be faked, are people finally starting to question everything, including what they were told before?

Of course, mostly rhetorical but I think about this a lot - if it is a good or bad thing. Now we know we are surrounded by fakeness that can be generated in seconds, maybe people will finally gain critical thinking skills, and the ability to discern truth from falseness better. Time will tell!

For now the way I see it is people are becoming reliant on these tools, and only will a community of people collaborating to better the outcomes can ensure alternate agendas do not lead the results.

[latexr]

> Were all the existing sources (e.g. news, podcasts, etc) ever reliable?

No, of course not. And I would deeply appreciate if you stopped arguing with straw men. When you do it repeatedly you are either arguing in bad faith or unable to realise you’re doing so, neither of which is positive. Please engage with the given argument, not a weaker version designed to be attacked.

But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt once more.

Provenance matters. I don’t trust everyone I know to be an expert on every subject, but I know who I can trust for what. I know exactly who I can ask biology, medical, or music questions. I know those people will give me right answers and an accurate evaluation of their confidence, or tell me truthfully when they don’t know. I know they can research and identify which sources are trustworthy. I also know they will get back to me and correct any error they may have made in the past. I can also determine who I can dismiss.

The same is true for searching the web. You don’t trust every website or author, you learn which are trustworthy.

You don’t have that with LLMs. They are a single source that you cannot trust for anything. They can give you different opposite answers to the same query, all with the same degree of confidence. And no, the added sources aren’t enough because not only are those often wrongly summarised, even stating the opposite, most people won’t ever verify them. Not to mention they can be made to support whatever point the creators want.

> Now we know LLMs hallucinate, and news can easily be faked, are people finally starting to question everything, including what they were told before?

No, they are not. That is idyllic and naive and betrays a lack of attention to the status quo. People are tricked and scammed every day by obviously AI pictures and texts, and double down on their wrong beliefs even when something is proven to have been a lie.