A lot of people use LLMs as the source of their objective truth. They have a question that would be very well answered with a search leading to a reputable source, but instead they ask some LLM chat bot and just blindly trust whatever it says.

How do you deal with that? Do you try to tell them about hallucinations and that LLMs have no concept of true or false? Or do you just let them be? What do you do when they do that in a conversation with you or encounter LLMs being used as a source for something that affects you?

I'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 advice forever. The person needs to take ownership for the output and getting it right, no matter the source, is their responsibility.

Ask 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.

I treat people who blindly believe an LLM the same way I treat people who blindly believe a religion or a political ideology or medical advice from Instagram.

If they ask what I think, I tell them.

If they don't want my opinion I keep it to myself.

Is this any different than people who believe random things they read on sketchy news sites or social media?

Not 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 diabetes and Parkinson's.

Question B responds that it may lead to sleep disruption, digestive issues, risk of osteoporosis.

Same question. One word difference. Two different directions.

This makes me take everything with a pinch of salt when I ask "Would Library A be a good fit for Problem X" - which is obviously a bit leading; I don't even trust what I hope are more neutral inputs like "How does Library A apply to Problem Space X", for example.

Are you talking about people who will still insist the LLM was correct even after being presented with evidence to the contrary, or people who don't EVER bother double checking answers they get out of said software since they assume it to be true?

> They have a question that would be very well answered with a search leading to a reputable source

Can you give an example of what kind of question you mean here?

Given that most people's idea of a reputable source is whatever comes up on the first page of Google or YouTube, I think we should use that as the comparison rather than dismissing LLM results. And we should do some empirical testing before making assumptions, otherwise we're just as bad as the people we are complaining about.

Whatever results we get, the real problem is that most people's ability to verify information was not good before LLMs, and it's still not good now.

So now you're dealing with LLM hallucinations, and before you were dealing with the ravings of whatever blogger or YouTuber managed to rank for this particular query.

Sure 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.

The same way that I handle anyone who blindly trusts anything on the internet. Could be an LLM, TikTok or YouTube video, Wikipedia article, news article, whatever.

It usually involves some form of "well, no, hold on..."

I don't fight them on it. I just ask "where did that come from?" and suggest checking a real source. Most people aren't trying to be wrong, they just want quick answers. If you show them how to double check without making it a big deal, they usually get it.

Unless they are someone that values your opinion there's nothing you can do other than move on.

Some comments here equating it to people who blindly believe things on the internet, but it's worse than that. Many previously rational people essentially getting hypnotized by LLM use and loosing touch of their rational thinking.

It's concerning to watch.

Simple. I became one of them. Ultimately, using an AI is a new skill, but you have to treat it like another person that sometimes bullshits you. That's why you leverage agents to refine, do research, and polish.

Ask AI to cite sources and then investigate the sources, or have another agent fact check the relevancy of the sources.

You can use this thing called ralph that let's you burn a lot of tokens at scale by simply having a detailed prompt work on a task and refining something from different lenses. It too AI about an hour to write: https://nexivibe.com/avoid.civil.war.web/

I do this on things that I know very well, and the moment I let it cook and iterate, collect feedback, the results become chef's kiss.

The agentic era that we are in is... very interesting.

I 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?

Explain 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.

Show them https://old.reddit.com/r/aifails/

I feel like I can trust LLMs more than the majority of info on the web. We used to believe the same of Google searches.

For me, for example have seen and experienced doctors making mis diagnosis (and they a reputable source), so what is the difference really?

I guess your question depends on the context they using the LLM as well for and what sort of questions they are asking.

Scientific fact based or opinion questions?

tell them what to prompt the AI with to get the correct results. I've seen a number youtube shorts lately doing this, where some scientist gets "refuted" by some random person based on an LLM result, they then sit with the LLM and ask the same question, get the same wrong answer, then follow it up with a clarifying question, which then the LLM realizes its mistake and gives a better answer.

How do you deal with people who trust their discursive mind?

At 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.

Simply prove them wrong (earnestly and in good faith). When they realise the LLM is fallible, they'll learn to be skeptical of it without you needing to teach them that specific lesson.

LLMs are trained to at least try not to be dangerous and stupid, which is more than you can say for the executive branch and half the country. On balance, I'd trust a SOTA LLM model blindly before I'd trust the average person blindly.

I would love to know. My manager shovels AI generated design documents at me and expects me to clean them up.

same way as i deal with people who trust other people.

I have a feeling this is like telling people "don't touch a live wire" and the more direct experiental "I won't touch a live wire again" lesson: People need to experience being hallucinated at, within their comprehension, and at best can be told about Gell-Mann Amnesia.

I doubt you can stop them from asking machines for answers. What you can do is aide them to learn how to distrust the answers competently, but outside their field of knowledge, applying skepticism is hard.

The irony of Gell-Mann Amnesia is that Michael Chrichton, who is said to have named it, suffered from it badly: Wrote well within his field, misapplied sciences to write well outside it, and said things which were indefensible.

It all depends on the context: how does this affects you?

Is this something you can control or is this outside your control?

Thanks for this. I was in the camp of trust the LLM but y’all have made valid points. After discussing with ChatGPT, it agree there are some areas where it should not be trusted as accurate, but it said with historical facts like the holocaust it should be high. Idk, perhaps we need labs to produce a chart of it level of trust deserve to certain topics

Honestly, the kind of people doing that is probably better served by AI (currently).

I'm saying that because they were not going to be critical of the search results, and google is not exactly showing objective truth in the first positions nowadays.

Its everywhere now its becoming a real problem in every corner of the internet and in the real world. People are using hallucinated legal cases in lawsuits, they are generating images to create fake events, they are using AI to write their CVS and just about everything you can imagine. People are having to wade through all this slop professionally, calling it out and pointing out the mistakes doesn't seem to help, the people using this stuff believe the AI is correct no matter what you say or do.

Like most things that go mainstream it will take a good while before people understand, by which point they will have learnt a lot of things that aren't true and they will never let them go. We might get a healthy use of current AI at some point in the future or if the product drastically improves.

All you can do now is hold them to the same standard you normally would, if you catch them lying whether an AI did it or not its their responsibility and you treat them accordingly.

Accept this this is going to continue to happen, ask yourself if it’s something in your control or not, and try to find a way to enjoy the ride. It’s going to be bumpy, as we’re going through trust issues outside of just LLMs as a society right now.

However, if I notice a friend is about to harm themselves in some way I’ll pull open their ChatGPT and show them directly how sycophantic it is by going completely 180 on what they prompted. It’s enough to make them second guess. I also correct people who say “he or she” when referring to an LLM to say “it” in dialog, and explain that it’s a tool, like a calculator. So gentle reframing has helped.

Sometimes I’ll ask them to pause and ask their gut first, but people are already disconnected from their own truths.

It’s going to be bumpy. Save your mental health.

A friend of mine severely injured her leg, especially knee, and went through a surgery. She said that she had a rehabilitation plan for the next 6 months. Guess what, from Gemini. I just told her just listen to her doctor.

I didn't tell her why LLMs can make mistakes or hallucinate because I thought that she would not appreciate my mansplaining.

Looking forward though, my boring answer would still be education. It is going to take time. But without understanding LLMs, they will not be easily persuaded.

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?

Generally not worth my time, energy, and effort. Why do I care if somebody believes a lie? I believe a ton of lies and I’m doing just fine.

Simple: tell them to ask their LLM about it ...

"Tell me about all the potential pitfalls of blindly trusting LLM output, and relate a couple or three true stories about when LLM misinformation has gone badly wrong for people."

At the very least, I'm glad most people finally recognize LLMs are being used as a political weapon against education. It's the same old power struggles as ever.

These people may be idiots who are impossible to reason with, but at least for now the LLMs have not been completely driven into the ground by SEO. They might actually be getting a taste of what it feels like to not be an idiot. I'm happy for them, but they'll snap out of it when their trust is broken. It's probably sometime soon anyway.

The 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.

There 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.

Introduce them to jailbroke LLMs.

asking ChatGPT to read and tell me what this post is about

They do not have a soul, they are NPCs incapable of reasoning. I don't mean lazy, incapable is literally what they are. Logic escapes them. When they say llms are conscious, and fully intelligent, them are comparing to themselves. If you think about it, they are right to say AGI is here, if the bar is the average human being. If you contemplate this fact for a moment, and start pondering it could be true, your life would change forever. Most beings just do not have a singular perspective, cannot reason, do not have a taste, cannot appreciate someone else's singular perspective. They also do not appreciate art for the same reason. I am sorry, truly. Just let them be. They would kill you before admitting they are forever stuck in Plato's cave.

the comments here are better than the article lol

There are two kinds of fools in the world: the kind who ask a search engine and believe the first reputable source they see, and the kind who ask an LLM and believe the first response that has a reputable citation.

How do you deal with people who trust religion?

Yesterday, I was praying to ChatGPT and asking for guidance on my car washing problem. Through its holy scripture, it suggested me to walk to the car wash to improve my fitness. When I arrived and found the absence of my car to be a true hindrance for washing, it occurred to me that I should have pondered the scripture more carefully to identify its true meaning.

I treat the LLM like a diety. Every sane person understands well enough that the Bible is not to be taken literally. And then when someone talks about using LLMs, I always rephrase that as prayer.