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Comment by EatingWithForks | Hacker News Reader

> People who use LLM’s already know they can give wrong information

I think this is unfortunately much less true than expected... Lawyer using chatgpt.. teachers using chatgpt... even professors using chatgpt... as if its a source of truth.

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There have been a few instances, sure, and they made headlines, but that was pretty early on when LLM behavior was not well understood. I think that fake citations (as the most obvious and well documented example) are a well understood problem now, and if you google “ChatGPT fake citation” you only get a few articles mostly referencing the same couple of cases from months ago. It doesn’t seem pervasive at all.

Anecdotal, but everytime I tell someone that the citations from ChatGPT can be bogus they are very surprised. They know that the answers can be incorrect, but they don't understand the process behind an LLM well enough to understand that a citation can be generated in the same way the rest of the text is.

My CTO showed me oh so ever happy that he translated in English something I did in French to send it to a foreign corporation. I read it, the first word was wrong. Most of the rest had more or less the same meaning, but not that first word. I argued ChatGPT is dangerous because he was gonna send an incorrect document because of it (he had not sent it yet), but he straight up _refused_ to admit the word was wrong and saying “the meaning is almost the same!” Well it was not… So yeah some people are not aware ChatGPT can be wrong/dangerous, and some people are worse, and refuse to believe/listen to actual people and prefer a robot.

It sounds like he was excited about it using some new tech and then was upset when you blithely smashed on him.

Would it have been more emotionally mature of him to put that aside and listen to your criticisms? Yes, of course. But you probably could have saved some trouble and conflict by sharing in his joy a little before helping him understand the pitfalls and issues.

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