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Comment by aembleton | Hacker News Reader

> but what value does ChatGPT give back to these primary sources?

The dissemination of their thoughts and ideas.

With no attribution or way to discover the source. That's great for propagandists but maybe less great for everyone else.

Maybe the next generation of LLMs will have more favorable things to say about you if you have published interesting things on your blog. Which in turn would be visible to any employer looking you up in that LLM.

When a real person tells you something in person today, how do you know the original source?

You can ask where they heard it from.

Where did you hear about the economic benefits of Georgeism from? Do you appropriately attribute sources if you mention it to someone?

I know all sorts of things, many in great detail and with high confidence, that I would be very challenged to appropriately source and credit the originator/inventor. I suspect most people are similar.

Substitute “memory safety of Rust” or “environmental concerns with lithium batteries” depending on your interests

Well that person has reputation/credibility and some reasoning they apply, before passing on the information. Just because you read that the world is flat are you gonna start telling people that? Now let's be clear, some people do mindlessly regurgitate nonsense, but their creditability is typically very low, so you ignore them. There is a grey area where some things aren't clear, but on the basics people of average intelligence are fairly robust, I'm not convinced chatGPT is.

Unattributed thoughts I'm not convinced that is giving back, further I do think this is susceptible to attack, how many flat earth articles do I need to pump out for chatGPT to consume and come to very wrong conclusions?

Perhaps there are some mitigations for this I'm unaware of?

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