Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world

I'm saying this unironically, but I wish there were courses on looking at information critically and more in how to have a healthy and safe life in the modern day world (including things like data security, how to deal with social media etc.) that would be taught to everyone in schools/colleges/universities.

In my country, there are still public announcements about not trusting random people calling you, never giving your bank details to strangers (every bank homepage says that, that the employees will never ask for that stuff) and people regularly get scammed anyways, the only thing sort of saving them is that scamming is only scalable so far... until you throw automation in the mix, in addition to just plainly spreading misinformation about any topic, or even just allowing people to be confidently incorrect and eliminating the need for them to even think that much (e.g. students just asking ChatGPT to do their homework).

Any step at least in the direction of educating people feels like a good thing.

That said, I don't hate LLMs or anything, I use them for development more or less daily (lovely for boilerplate in your average enterprise Java codebase, for example) and recently saw this project, which made me happy: https://sites.google.com/view/eurollm/home

I was speaking to a friend the other day who works in a team that influences government policy. One of the younger members of the team had been tasked with generating a report on a specific subject. They came back with a document filled with “facts”, including specific numbers they’d pulled from a LLM. Obviously it was inaccurate and unreliable.

As someone who uses LLMs on a daily basis to help me build software, I was blown away that someone would misuse them like this. It’s easy to forget that devs have a much better understanding of how these things work, can review and fix the inaccuracies in the output and tend to be a sceptical bunch in general.

We’re headed into a time where a lot of people are going to implicitly trust the output from these devices and the world is going to be swamped with a huge quantity of subtly inaccurate content.