[genewitch]

> kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messaging.

in the early 2000s in california universities you'd get marked down for citing wikipedia. so the good souls told everyone "see the number in brackets[2] after what you're trying to cite the article for? just click that then click the archive.org or whatever link there, then cite that."

Now? i think wiki is considered a valid source? or has it flopped back to being "unreliable"?

[sheept]

It's not that it's unreliable, it's just lazy research. Wikipedia, like all encyclopedias, is a tertiary source, but ideally your essay should be a mix of primary and secondary sources, while Wikipedia discourages original research and prefers only secondary sources. Wikipedia itself recommends against citing it as research[0] for this reason.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia

[kaliqt]

Laziness should never be the issue.

The issue is that Wikipedia can be wrong and you’d only know that by going to the source (or lack thereof), or checking other sources.

[pqtyw]

All secondary sources can be just as wrong, while standards of course might differ being published doesn't prove much on its own. Also of course in many/most non theoretical fields you find plenty of conflicting sources so relying on a "consensus" based high quality encyclopaedia article seems like a more reliable approach if you are new to the field and don't really understand what you are reading.

[bjourne]

Wikipedia and text bots are unreliable sources for the exact same reason---they are anonymous. The point of a citation is stating that "I know this because X told me". The validity of that argument entirely depends on the authority and reputational harm X would suffer for being wrong.

[ValentineC]

I think Wikipedia's still considered unreliable, but the question that should be asked is whether the author even read the source in "the number in brackets" to ensure that it's even backed properly.

Just like how people should use AI for research, I guess.

[genewitch]

When i comment that i've researched using AI this way, it short circuits the brain of the listener/viewer and suddenly my sources aren't valid.

a bing or google or wiki search to get the primary or secondary sources are okay, but if i use chat.deepseek.com instead, suddenly it isn't okay.

[arjie]

Imagine that this website has a million visitors but just 100 rabid fans of one position. Imagine you read a comment. The website UX does not allow you to differentiate whether this is a person who is obsessive about one position or not. It doesn’t tell you whether you’re going against the consensus or not. So a small group of 100 users could create a bubble of visibility of a certain position. They could ensure you’re always voted down when you express a position.

You would never know.

The voting ring mechanic is hard to block but the comment mechanic is easy. Block a few hundred users and suddenly this site starts having much higher SNR.

[yakbarber]

This is just human behaviour though. We're wired for "a lot of people who do X, also do Y". "this person does X, therefore they must do Y". Obviously, not all brown things are cows, but that's how it be, it's got nothing to do with ai.

[andrepd]

LLMs routinely hallucinate sources. I guess that's why some people feel that way.

[genewitch]

Right, but is there a difference between searching, say "acetaminophen and ibuprofen combined in emergency department settings" on google/ddg and asking an AI to give me primary sources for the same - if i am going to use the primary source anyhow? I just mention "i used AI to find this" because usually there's no good way to do a google search, or there wasn't the last time i tried.

For example, is glyphosate the active ingredient in roundup? there are studies that suggest not. I can't remember the university, i can remember the rough decade (2010s). all i know for sure is that someone showed that glyphosate isn't the active ingredient, really.

Deepseek can't find it. ddg doesn't come up with it immediately. I might try "deep think" mode on some other AI later, or use an older LLM model i have locally to see. I have the pdf, i just didn't rename it to be searchable! doggone it.

[kranke155]

LLM assisted search is now one of the best ways to look into dense and obscure topics though, particularly given as google search quality has degraded. All it needs is for you to read the sources.

Source hallucination has also come down tremendously.

[andrepd]

I had to re-read that twice, some how my eyes slipped over this part: I thought you were saying "in the early 2000s in California schools you'd get marked down". Which yeah of course, lazy kids would copy-paste Wikipedia (with the formatting sometimes, lol) but you have to teach them that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a source, and yeah looking at the citations in brackets is what you should do.

But no you were talking about universities... The concept of citing Wikipedia in university is wild x)