If I needed something verifiable, or wanted to learn the material in any depth, I would certainly not rely on an AI summary. However, the summary contained links to source material by known experts, and I would cheerfully rely on those.

The same is true if I imagined there would be misleading bullshit out there. In this case, it's hard to imagine that any nonexpert would bother writing about the topic. ("Universal torsor method" in case you're curious.)

I skimmed the AI summary in ten seconds, gained a rough idea of what the speaker was referring to, and then went back to following the lecture.

At least with pre-AI search, the info is provided with a source. So there is a small level of reputation that can be considered. With AI, it's a black box that someone decides what to train it on, and as someone said elsewhere, there's no way to police its sources. To get the best results, you have to turn it loose on everything.

So someone who wants a war or wants Tweedledum to get more votes than Tweedledee has incentives to poison the well and disseminate fake content that makes it into the training set. Then there's a whole department of "safety" that has to manually untrain it to not be politically incorrect, racist etc. Because the whole thesis is don't think for yourself, let the AI think for you.

A lot of the time, the definitions peculiar to a subfield of science _don't_ require much or any additional technical background to understand. They're just abbreviations for special cases that frequently occur in the subfield.

Looking this sort of thing up on the fly in lecture is a great use for LLMs. You'll lose track of the lecture if you go off to find the definition in a reference text. And you can check your understanding against the material discussed in the lecture.

The issue is even deeper - the 1 thing in 5 minutes was probably already surface knowledge. We don’t usually really ‘know’ the thing that quickly. But we might have a chance.

The 3 things in 5 minutes is even worse - it’s like taking Google Maps everywhere without even thinking about how to get from point A to point B - the odds of knowing anything at all from that are near zero.

And since it summarizes the original content, it’s an even bigger issue - we never even have contact with the thing we’re putatively learning from, so it’s even harder to tell bullshit from reality.

It’s like we never even drove the directions Google Maps was giving us.

We’re going to end up with a huge number of extremely disconnected and useless people, who all absolutely insist they know things and can do stuff. :s

This is just garbage in, garbage out. Would you better off if I gave you an incorrect source? What about three incorrect ones? And a search engine would also associate you with this term now. Nothing you describe here seems specific to AU.

Try the same with Perplexity?

> If i need a quick overview of a subject i don't necessarily need anything more then a low quality summary

It's true. I previously had no idea of the proper number of rocks to eat, but thanks to a notorious summary (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd11gzejgz4o) I have all the rock-eating knowledge I need.

In my experience Google's AI summaries are consistently accurate when retrieving technical information. In particular, documentation for long-lived, infrequently changing software packages tends to be accurate.

If you ask Google about news, world history, pop culture, current events, places of interest, etc., it will lie to you frequently and confidently. In these cases, the "low quality summary" is very often a completely idiotic and inane fabrication.