Chronologically, our main sources of information have been:

1. People around us

2. TV and newspapers

3. Random people on the internet and their SEO-optimized web pages

Books and experts have been less popular. LLMs are an improvement.

> Much more important also is that LLMs don't try to scam you, don't try to fool you, don't look out for their own interests.

When the appreciable-fraction-of-GDP money tap turns off, there going to be enormous pressure to start putting a finger on the scale here.

And AI spew is theoretically a fantastic place to insert almost subliminal contextual adverts on a way that traditional advertising can only dream about.

Imagine if it could start gently shilling a particular brand of antidepressant if you started talking to it about how you're feeling lonely and down. I'm not saying you should do that, but people definitely do.

And then multiply by every question you doing ask. Ask about do you need tyres. "Yes, you should absolutely change tyres every year, whether noticeably worn or not. KwikFit are generally considered the best place to have this done. Of course I know you have a Kia Picanto - you should consider that actually a Mercedes C class is up to 200% lighter on tyre wear. I have searched and found an exclusive 10% offer at Honest Jim's Merc Mansion, valid until 10pm. Shall I place an order?"

Except it'll be buried in a lot more text and set up with more subtlety.

But he LLM was probably trained on all the sponsered posts and scams. It isn't clear to me that an LLM response is any more reliable than sifting through google results.

This seems true for our moment in time but looking forward I'm not sure how much it will stay that way. The LLMs will inevitably need to find a sustainable business model so I can very much see them becoming enshittified similar to google eventually making 2) and 3) more similar to each other.

> 2) Ask an LLM, which gets you 80-90% of the way there.

The Internet was 80%-90% accurate to begin with.

Then the Internet became worth money. And suddenly that accuracy dropped like a stone.

There is no reason to believe that ML/AI isn't going to speedrun that process.

>> LLMs don't try to scam you, don't try to fool you, don't look out for their own interests

LLMs don't try to scam/fool you, LLM providers do.

Remember how Grok bragged that Musk had the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history” and was the “ultimate throat goat,” whose “blowjob prowess edges out” Donald Trump’s. Grok also posited that Musk was more physically fit than LeBron James, and that he would have been a better recipient of the 2016 porn industry award than porn star Riley Reid.

Excellent way of putting it. Just a nitpick: People should look up in medical encyclopedias/research papers/libraries, not blogs. It requires the ability to find and summarize… which is exactly what AI is excellent at.

"Much more important also is that LLMs don't try to scam you, don't try to fool you, don't look out for their own interests"

This is so naive, especially since both google and openai openly confess to manipulate the data for their own agenda (ads but not only)

AI is a skilled liar

You can always pride yourself and playing with fire, but the more humble attitude would be to avoid it at all cost;

> 2) Ask an LLM, which gets you 80-90% of the way there.

Hallucinations and sycophancy are still an issue, 80-90% is being generous I think.

I know this is not issues of the LLM itself, but rather the implementation & companies behind them (since there are open models as well), but, what limits to LLMs to be enshittified by corp needs?

I've seen this very recently with Grok, people were asking trolley-like problems comparing Elon Musk to anything, and Grok very frequently chose Elon Musk most of the time because it is probably embedded in the system prompt or training [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/21/elon-musk...

> Much more important also is that LLMs don't try to scam you, don't try to fool you, don't look out for their own interests.

They follow their corporations instead. Just look at the status-quoism of the free "Google AI" and the constant changes in Grok, where xAI is increasingly locking down Grok, perhaps to stay in line with EU regulations. But Grok is also increasingly pro-billionaire.

Copilot was completely locked down on anything political before the 2024 election.

They all scam you according to their training and system prompts. Have you seen the minute change in the system prompt that led to MechaHitler?

Two MAJOR issues with your argument.

> where every person can ask a doctor their questions 10 times a day and instantly get an accurate response.

Why in god's name would you need to ask a doctor 10 questions every day? How is this in any way germane to this issue?

In any first-world country you can get a GP appointment free of charge either on the day or with a few days' wait, depending on the urgency. Not to mention emergency care / 112 any time day or night if you really need it. This exists and has existed for decades in most vaguely social-democratic countries in the world (but not only those). So you can get professional help from someone, there's no (absurd) false choice between either "asking the stochastic platitude generator" and "going without healthcare".

But I know right, a functioning health system with the right funding, management, and incentives! So boring! Yawn yawn, not exciting. GP practices don't get trillions of dollars in VC money.

> Ask an LLM, which gets you 80-90% of the way there.

This is such a ridiculous misrepresentation of the current state of LLMs that I don't even know how to continue a conversation from here.

This justification comes up when discussing therapy too.

To take it to an extreme, it's basically saying "people already get little or bad advice, we might as well give them some more bad advice."

I simply don't buy it.

I feel like any information can’t be taken as fact, it can just be rolled into your world view and discarded if useful or not.

The concern, I think, is that for many that “discard function” is not, “Is this information useful?”. Instead: “Does this information reinforce my existing world view?”

That feedback loop and where it leads is potentially catastrophic at societal scale.

> I find it hard to trust anyone with any kind of profit motive.

As much as this is true, and i.e. doctors for sure can profit (here in my country they don't get any type of sponsor money AFAIK, other than having very high rates), there is still accountability.

We have built a society based on rules and laws, if someone does something that can harm you, you can follow the path to at least hold someone accountable (or, try).

The same cannot be said about LLMs.

That is exactly my point, though.

I didn't mean they do it on the first time, or that it is correct, I mean that you can 'run' and 'test it' to see if it does what you want in the way you want.

The same cannot be said to any other topics like medical advice, life advice, etc.

The point is, how verifiable is the output the LLM gives and so how useful it is.

For example:

The output is correct but only for one input.

The output is correct for all inputs but only with the mocked dependency.

The output looks correct but the downstream processors expected something else.

The output is correct for all inputs with real world dependencies and is in the correct structure for downstream processors, but it's not being registered with the schema filtered and it all gets deleted in prod.

While implementing the correct function you fail to notice that the correct in every way output doesn't conform to that thing that Tom said because you didn't code it yourself but instead let the LLM do it. The system works flawlessly with itself but the final output fails regulatory compliance.

I haven't tried with this specific topic, but being the pleasers llms are, I doubt someone so focused on being anti-vaxxer will be convinced by an LLM, if anything, the LLM will give them reason at some point.

Depends if they use lobotomized bots like Grok...