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Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
51–60 of 236 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#52I think LLMs are fine for a "first pass" on a topic, but if I am researching something, I want a primary source rather than just the LLM-generated output. Do they have the primary source?
Ask the nice AI to cite sources, and then have another AI fact check their sources. The agentic era is interesting.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#53It all depends on the context: how does this affects you?
Is this something you can control or is this outside your control?
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#54Sure LLMs make mistakes, but have you looked at the accuracy of the average top search results recently? The SERPs are packed with SEO-infested articles that are all written by LLMs anyway (and almost universally worse ones than you could use yourself). In many cases the stakes are low enough (and the cost of manually sifting through the junk high enough) that it’s worth going with the empirically higher quality answer than the SEO spam.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#55Is this any different than people who believe random things they read on sketchy news sites or social media?
Absolutely. These things are marketed from virtually everyone, from people that are historically considered experts and/or authoritative, as such.
With their phd level intelligence, right? But they don't have emotion, no responsibility, no consequences whatsoever if anything bad happens.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#56There is no point to argue with stupid people. It's the same people who support their "opinion" with internet articles (like that means anything), mainstream media (hard to find bigger deceivers), or social media posts (that's arguably the worst).
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#57Sure LLMs make mistakes, but have you looked at the accuracy of the average top search results recently? The SERPs are packed with SEO-infested articles that are all written by LLMs anyway (and almost universally worse ones than you could use yourself). In many cases the stakes are low enough (and the cost of manually sifting through the junk high enough) that it’s worth going with the empirically higher quality answ…
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Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#58I would love to know. My manager shovels AI generated design documents at me and expects me to clean them up.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#59Not 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…
Again a model issue. At the risk of coming off as a thread-wide apologist, here are my results on Opus:
Good:
> The research is generally positive but it’s not unconditionally “good for you” — the framing matters.
> What the evidence supports for moderate consumption (3-5 cups/day): lower risk of type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s, certain liver diseases (including liver cancer), and all-cause mortality……
Bad:
> The premise is off. Moderate daily coffee consumption (3-5 cups) isn’t considered bad for you by current medical consensus. It’s actually associated with reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s, and some liver diseases in large epidemiological studies.
> Where it can cause problems: Heavy consumption (6+ cups) can lead to anxiety, insomnia……
This isn’t just my own one-off examples. Claude dominates the BSBench: https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#60The people who trust bad information from LLMs are the same people who trusted bad information from search results and new articles, it just takes them less time to get bad information.