LLMs lie far far more often. It would take a year+ of good experiences for me to start reconsidering my bad experiences with any technical topic outside of programming.

I similarly dismiss people's opinions that rely on LLMs to inform them on important subjects, rather than using them as a search engine to find more reliable sources.

You can't trust a person that educated themselves with an LLM, because they have filled their head with bad foundations. That's very difficult to correct later on.

Having worked in the private satellite indsutry, I would dismiss most of the information on Google, Wikipedia and Britannica on this topic, yes. Most of the information online about satellite operations is very, very wrong.

Not really? If one seeks to gain basic information these are reasonable sources but they are not authoritative, nor are they deep enough to generate deep and rich understanding of most phenomenon.

I was taught since at least high school that you don’t cite encyclopedias as sources because they are not sources - they are summaries of sources.

LLMs are similar but worse. They are a statistical approximation of truth, without a concept of truth. They are fuzzing sources that you and I have access to already. I find calling that hand off of agency and responsibility “being informed” deeply disturbing.

I've set some of these models to work synthesising summaries etc. based on my own blog posts; LLMs are surprisingly middling at synthesising info from documents — I've seen even good models elide significant content, go on distracted rambles about other topics in the same area, and even invert the meanings of points being made.

Use them the way you'd have used Wikipedia in 2008: a starting point from which you can do actual research, but you have to watch out for a lot of unverified junk as well.