YHK - yet another hacker news clone

However, if I notice a friend is about to harm themselves in some way I’ll pull open their ChatGPT and show them directly how sycophantic it is by going completely 180 on what they prompted. It’s enough to make them second guess. I also correct people who say “he or she” when referring to an LLM to say “it” in dialog, and explain that it’s a tool, like a calculator. So gentle reframing has helped.

Sometimes I’ll ask them to pause and ask their gut first, but people are already disconnected from their own truths.

It’s going to be bumpy. Save your mental health.

I'm saying that because they were not going to be critical of the search results, and google is not exactly showing objective truth in the first positions nowadays.

I treat the LLM like a diety. Every sane person understands well enough that the Bible is not to be taken literally. And then when someone talks about using LLMs, I always rephrase that as prayer.

LLMs aren't a special case to me. Glue doesn't belong on pizza and you shouldn't eat one rock a day but we've been giving and getting bad advice forever. The person needs to take ownership for the output and getting it right, no matter the source, is their responsibility.

Like most things that go mainstream it will take a good while before people understand, by which point they will have learnt a lot of things that aren't true and they will never let them go. We might get a healthy use of current AI at some point in the future or if the product drastically improves.

All you can do now is hold them to the same standard you normally would, if you catch them lying whether an AI did it or not its their responsibility and you treat them accordingly.

I doubt you can stop them from asking machines for answers. What you can do is aide them to learn how to distrust the answers competently, but outside their field of knowledge, applying skepticism is hard.

The irony of Gell-Mann Amnesia is that Michael Chrichton, who is said to have named it, suffered from it badly: Wrote well within his field, misapplied sciences to write well outside it, and said things which were indefensible.

"Tell me about all the potential pitfalls of blindly trusting LLM output, and relate a couple or three true stories about when LLM misinformation has gone badly wrong for people."

It usually involves some form of "well, no, hold on..."

I didn't tell her why LLMs can make mistakes or hallucinate because I thought that she would not appreciate my mansplaining.

Looking forward though, my boring answer would still be education. It is going to take time. But without understanding LLMs, they will not be easily persuaded.

A: Why is drinking coffee every day so good for you?

B: Why is drinking coffee every day so bad for you?

Question A responds that it has "several health benefits", antioxidants, liver health, reduced risk of diabetes and Parkinson's.

Question B responds that it may lead to sleep disruption, digestive issues, risk of osteoporosis.

Same question. One word difference. Two different directions.

This makes me take everything with a pinch of salt when I ask "Would Library A be a good fit for Problem X" - which is obviously a bit leading; I don't even trust what I hope are more neutral inputs like "How does Library A apply to Problem Space X", for example.

Is this something you can control or is this outside your control?

This of course doesn’t apply to high-stakes settings. In these cases I find LLMs are still a great information retrieval approach, but it’s a starting point to manual vetting.

Now they got another "God" in LLM.

How to deal? Just ignore. There is way more stupid people with stupid opinions than we can possibly estimate.

Some comments here equating it to people who blindly believe things on the internet, but it's worse than that. Many previously rational people essentially getting hypnotized by LLM use and loosing touch of their rational thinking.

It's concerning to watch.

Ask AI to cite sources and then investigate the sources, or have another agent fact check the relevancy of the sources.

You can use this thing called ralph that let's you burn a lot of tokens at scale by simply having a detailed prompt work on a task and refining something from different lenses. It too AI about an hour to write: https://nexivibe.com/avoid.civil.war.web/

I do this on things that I know very well, and the moment I let it cook and iterate, collect feedback, the results become chef's kiss.

The agentic era that we are in is... very interesting.

These people may be idiots who are impossible to reason with, but at least for now the LLMs have not been completely driven into the ground by SEO. They might actually be getting a taste of what it feels like to not be an idiot. I'm happy for them, but they'll snap out of it when their trust is broken. It's probably sometime soon anyway.

So I said, don't ever trust the output of an LLM without verification. However this caused me some hassle with the AI adoption manager. We have minimum-use AI KPI's for employees and he asked me to stop saying these things or people will use it less.

In the end I just hated the company a little bit more. I'm just sick of fighting against idiot. And he does have a point, our leadership is pretty crazy about the AI hype, they want everyone to be on it all the time. They don't seem to care whether it adds value or if it even detracts.

For me, for example have seen and experienced doctors making mis diagnosis (and they a reputable source), so what is the difference really?

I guess your question depends on the context they using the LLM as well for and what sort of questions they are asking.

Scientific fact based or opinion questions?

Can you give an example of what kind of question you mean here?

Given that most people's idea of a reputable source is whatever comes up on the first page of Google or YouTube, I think we should use that as the comparison rather than dismissing LLM results. And we should do some empirical testing before making assumptions, otherwise we're just as bad as the people we are complaining about.

Whatever results we get, the real problem is that most people's ability to verify information was not good before LLMs, and it's still not good now.

So now you're dealing with LLM hallucinations, and before you were dealing with the ravings of whatever blogger or YouTuber managed to rank for this particular query.

If they ask what I think, I tell them.

If they don't want my opinion I keep it to myself.

I’ll take LLMs any day over what search and the rest of the Internet has turned into.