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Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#121

Post by mkozlows »

odo1242 wrote: post #118
ericpauley wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an oft-repeated meme, but I’m convinced the people saying it are either blindly repeating it, using bad models/system prompts, or some other issue. Claude Opus will absolutely push back if you disagree. I routinely push back on Claude only to discover on further evaluation that the model was correct. As a test I just did exactly what you said in a Claude Opus 4.6 session about another HN thread. Claude consid…

Claude Opus 4.6 is the best possible model to use in this test, with the least sycophancy. OpenAI and Gemini models are bad in comparison.

ChatGPT thinking models are very good; the instant model is bad. Gemini is always desperate to find an answer, and will give you one no matter what.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#122

Post by D-Machine »

acheron wrote: post #120

A search isn’t going to lead them to a “reputable source”, it’s going to lead them to ad filled SEO garbage, because it’s not 2004 anymore and thousands of Google employees have been working for two decades to ruin the Internet. I’ll take LLMs any day over what search and the rest of the Internet has turned into.

Right, I think (hope) the OP meant not to emphasize the "search" in the sentence, but the "reputable source". Of course a Google search now is much worse than an AI search.

And it is the ultimately the reputable source that matters, and whether the person actually read it and checked that the details matched the summary (be it human abstract, LLM-generated, or otherwise).

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#124

Post by Jensson »

tayo42 wrote: post #78
katet wrote: post #49

Not that I've had to deal with this specifically, but I have noticed how the input phrasing in my prompts pushes the LLM in different directions. I've just tried a quick test with `duck.ai` on gpt 4o-mini with: 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 d…

A person would respond the same way? What exactly are you expecting as the output to those questions?

Clickbait journalists answers like that, experts mostly don't. But it does make sense it mimics clickbait journalists more since it was trained on the internet.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#125

Post by lovelearning »

> a reputable source

News reporters and editors have their biases. Book authors have their biases. Scientists and research papers have their biases. Search engines have their biases. Google too.

All human-created systems have biases shaped by the environments, social norms, education, traditions, etc. of their creators and managers.

So, the concepts of "objective truth" and "reputable" need to be analyzed more critically.

They seem to be labels given to sources we have learned to trust by habit. Some people trust newspapers over TV. Some people trust some newspapers over other newspapers. All of it often on emotional grounds of agreeability with our own biases. Then we seem to post-rationalize this emotion of agreeability using terms like "objective truth" and "reputable".

Is Google search engine that leads to NY Times or Fox News or Wikipedia and makes us manually choose sources as per our biases "better" than Google's Gemini engine that summarizes content from all the above sources and gives an average answer? (Note: "average answer" as of current versions; in future, its training too may be explicitly biased, like Grok and DeepSeek did).

Perhaps we can start using terms like "human sources of information" versus "AI sources of information" and get rid of the contentious terms.

Then critically analyze whether one set of sources is better than the other, or they complement each other.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#126

Post by phito »

mathgladiator wrote: post #91
mtndew4brkfst wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we watch this viewpoint proliferate thousands and thousands of times over, even if it's less commonly stated so baldly, and yet people still wonder where the doomer viewpoints stem from?

Yes, but I am full in on simulation hypothesis, and people are going to enter the matrix... willingly. https://nexivibe.com/intj.html

While some of the ideas in this do resonate with me (or at least they're entertaining), it's unfortunate that's it's so obviously LLM generated. And some parts of it, like the INTJ exceptionalism, reek of LLM sycophancy, which then turned into to some kind of god complex...

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#128

Post by kombookcha »

wolvoleo wrote: post #85

At work I had this kind of discussion on a conference call, someone looked something up about a internal company policy and it came back with a hallucinated wrong result. 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…

That sounds insufferable and I'm sorry your coworker and your bosses have gotten this hypnotized. There are actual use cases, but this type of productivity cargo cult drives me up the wall.

At least if they were into filling the office with magic crystals, it would be decorative and easily ignored. This is just forcing people to spend a bunch of tokens in a dull ritual to make the line go up.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#129

Post by kombookcha »

dlm24 wrote: post #103
b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where do you think most of that info came from though? Not from the public library

I hear you, But my understanding is LLM can consume multiple sources of information and deduce what is the truth better and more accurately than a human clicking on multiple Google links and veryfying information and sources.

LLMs by definition cannot deduce, because they cannot not know or think. There's guard rails to try to make it more correct than wrong, but ultimately it's about which words seem like they would fit when coming after your words.

It's a neat trick, but the mind wants to ascribe meaning and reason to words that sound meaningful and reasonable, but these words do not come from a thinking mind with intent and interiority. It would be much more interesting if they did, but when and if that does happen, it won't be from an LLM as we know them today.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?

#130

Post by rvz »

Just assume that they are an expert in said acquired knowledge and you should ask which non-AI source (book, or human expert) did they learn this information from and ask them more questions around that.

This works especially if you studied in that subject matter, you should be able to immediately detect anything answer that is inconsistent or if they give hallucinated sources.

That is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

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