LLMs give you sources now even if you don’t ask for it. If you don’t like it you can ask for more reputable sources. What kind of 2023 question is this?
Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
81–90 of 236 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#82Ask them to tell the LLM it's wrong... then when it goes "You are absolutely right!" to challenge it and say that it was a test. Then when it replies, ask it if it's 100% sure. They'll lose faith pretty quick.
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…
Can you share your system prompt?
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
A large swath of the population are emotional biased engines. A lot of people trust people more than LLMs which is also flawed under certain conditions.
Very anti-human take right here.
I thought, in given that it seems to accurately describe the human condition, it was a very human take.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#84[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#85At 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.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#86Explain that the models are compressed with a lossy compression, and point out that every so often, an answer will be pulled from a section of the model space which has compression errors.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
counterpoint: if I have to treat the computer like a person, what's the point of talking to a computer in the first place? Particularly when there are so many other systems that can provide answers without the runaround
Humans cost $xx,yyy a year. Claude max-x20 is $2,400 a year. I talk to the computer like a person to get the computer to do things that humans used to do. Having managed people before, I'm going all in on AI.
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?
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#88I'm going to hold them to the same standard no matter if they use crappy sources, plagiarize, or hallucinate on their own. If someone asked, when and if I am in a position where I have to tell them, I would remind them that LLMs prioritize their own confidence over correctness. 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 adv…
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Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, somehow. I have been dealing with an awful lot of people who basically have what are theoretically logic degrees who suddenly just take LLMs at face value, or quote them to me like that actually means anything. People I formerly thought were sane.
I don't mean to put words in your mouth but from what I've seen, in person but mostly online, but the "problem" (and I put that in quotes because I don't even know what to call it... it seems deeper than a mere "problem") is that they quote them as if they are autonomous, sentient beings.
The problem is that LLM output looks like a human conversation. People believe it.
Which is more believable?
“The sky is filled with a downpour of squealing pigs. Would you like me to suggest the best type of umbrella?”
“Sky pigs squealing”
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I think AI bots are more compelling to some people. They break the concept of judging information by its source because they obscure the source. But at the same time they are trained on a lot of reputable sources and can say a lot of very smart things, just at other times they say complete BS. But they are really good at making things sound plausible, that's essentially how they work after all.
I would argue for many people social media and news aggregators do the exact same thing. People site Instagram or TikTok as the source of their data in the same way others site ChatGPT
Many go one step fewer and just take the headline title as the source…