LLMs can definitely be helpful, but you need your radar set to 11 because they will convincingly feed you smart sounding nonsense when you are most at risk.
Yeah, but this is like saying that one needn't focus so much on LLMs making mistakes because humans also mistakes.
They do, but the shape of the way LLMs will confidently mislead you is quite different to the way misinformed humans, or even the malevolent and mendacious humans, will mislead you.
Yes, but human errors are based on genuine and elaborate misconceptions (or propagandistic intent), not squishy, facile "you're right to push back on that, I straight up made that up" type stuff.
I just apply the "Wikipedia model" to things like LLMs (and StackOverflow, which can be just as bad -but without the admitting error part).
I look for citations and footnotes. In many cases, accuracy isn't something that I worry about, as bad info becomes apparent, almost immediately. In cases where it matters, though, I may try a couple of verifications.
One problem with humans, is that we can be quite insecure, and will fight to the death to defend a provably wrong position, because we can't bear to be seen as in error.
Can you elaborate on this? I suspect that you’re thinking mostly of cases in which you already have a fair bit of domain expertise. But in the general case, this seems to be very untrue. Which is why it’s so pernicious that LLMs can generate such quantities of syntactically-plausible-but-factually-untrue text.