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dspillett 3 hours ago

> You cannot permit your employees to use LLMs in this manner and then tell them it's entirely their fault when it makes mistakes, because you gave them permission to use something that will make mistakes 100% without fail.

Yes you can. The same way Wikipedia (or, way back when, a paper encyclopedia) can be used for research but you have to verify everything with other sources because it is known there are errors and deficiencies in such sources. Or using outsourced dev resource (meat-based outsourced devs can be as faulty as an LLM, some would argue sometimes more so) without reviewing their code before implemeting it in production.

Should they also ban them from talking to people as sources of information, because people can be misinformed or actively lie, rather than instead insisting that information found from such sources be sense-checked before use in an article?

Personally I barely touch LLMs at all (at some point this is going to wind up DayJob where they think the tech will make me more efficient…) but if someone is properly using them as a different form of search engine, or to pick out related keywords/phrases that are associated with what they are looking for but they might not have thought of themselves, that would be valid IMO. Using them in these ways is very different from doing a direct copy+paste of the LLM output and calling it a day. There is a difference between using a tool to help with your task and using a tool to be lazy.

> it's company policy not to burn everything to the ground!

The flamethrower example is silly hyperbole IMO, and a bad example anyway because everywhere where potentially dangerous equipment is actually made available for someone's job you will find policies exactly like this. Military use: “we gave them flamethrowers for X and specifically trained them not to deploy them near civilians, the relevant people have been court-martialled and duly punished for the burnign down of that school”. Civilian use: “the use of flamethrowers to initiate controlled land-clearance burns must be properly signed-off before work commences, and the work should only be signed of to be performed by those who have been through the full operation and safety training programs or without an environmental risk assessment”.