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Comment by dcre | Hacker News Reader

Every day I see people who do not seem to know LLMs use web search and cite sources.

Google Search's AI Overview just the other day confidently mis-summarized a source so badly that it came to the exact opposite conclusion to what the source actually contained:

https://imgur.com/a/WL8KzdB

Yes, AI Overview is a pretty weak model, but it somehow got "yes, that photo is AI" from an article explaining "not only is that photo not AI, here is the reporter who took the photo."

The other thing is that it is often hard to tell whether a model is talking about a source because the surrounding system has run a search and injected it into the prompt, or whether it's just freestyling based on its training data.

That’s because LLM’s generally don’t cite their sources. Web search is a tool outside of the LLM. Depending on the particular chat interface, there are any manner of tools in place to augment LLM capabilities/outputs, and they are constantly changing.

I agree that this is mostly OpenAI’s fault, though I also think people posting strong claims about LLMs online have a responsibility to know slightly more than the average user.

If one is trying to make an argument about the usefulness of LLMs, it’s irrelevant whether LLMs on their own can cite sources. If they can be trivially put into a system that can cite sources, that is a better measure of it’s usefulness.

I mean, it’s not trivial. There is a lot of work involved with enabling tool use at scale so that it works most of the time. Hiding that work makes it worse for the common user, because they aren’t necessarily going to understand the difference between platforms.

And at best it's the same as me asking my smart friend and copy/pasting their response to you, as if them citing sources puts the onus on you with rather than me to check the citations.

If you consider correctly citing a source that is explicitly provided in the context via tool use, then sure.

They absolutely cannot correctly cite sources otherwise.

Yes, I consider citing a source to be citing a source.

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