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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

If people used LLMs more we would have fewer instances of misinformation. Lots of comments in social media could easily be dispelled by a single LLM search.

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LLMs can be injected with biases as well. Just look at Grok's responses any time it's tagged in anything mildly political.

That’s like saying journalism is not useful because journalists are biased.

Bias is useful and inevitable

Bad journalists are biased. Good journalists will present a story as factually as possible and as void of bias as possible (of course it's impossible to not have any biases). Opinion pieces can have as much bias as they like as long as they're strictly marked as opinions.

That's not true. Any journalist would tell you that picking the stories you chose to cover is just as much a bias as how you chose to cover them. Even then, the specific words you pick, how you ask the interviewees, how you place the story on the page, what you pick as the "related stories". All of that is Editorial and reflects an opinion.

Good journalists are open about their angle. Bad journalists tell you they are "unbiased" and "just bringing you the facts".

In the case of publications we luckily have such fantastic resources as mediabiasfactcheck[0] to keep their bias in check and to keep them factual.

LLMs are much harder to fact-check because they can make anything up based on their training data and weights without sources.

[0] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com

And biased journalism is still useful and informational.

I mean yeah, it's Grok. They had to work really hard to get their preferred levels of political bias in there.

Any examples of political bias?

Apart from calling itself "Mecha Hitler" and that time it made every conversation be about "white genocide" in South Africa?

There's also Grokipedia, supposedly make by Grok, where I'd point to section 3.6 ("Controversial topics"): https://arxiv.org/html/2511.09685v1

Or it could give out bad information and make everything worse because a subset of people seem to think LLMs are infallible or gods rather than aggregates of the knowledge they’ve consumed.

If you’ve used LLMs you’d know that they are way more correct than not.

Even a small % of incorrectness quickly produces compounding effects, if you view LLMs as an information source. True or false statements are made with equal confidence, because the LLM can’t distinguish true from false.

That’s the same as in normal journalism so I’m not sure why you pick LLMs as particularly bad

Do you really think e.g Opus 4.6 is less reliable than the average facebook/x post (which is where most people get their news from today)?

People already just blindly believe whatever is put in front of them by the algorithm gods. Even the "@Grok is this real" spam on every X post is an improvement.

I think that neither is especially reliable, but that putting LLMs on some sort of pedestal as 'better' for information lookup here is a bad plan.

Incorrect.

i.e. Russian networks flood the Internet with propaganda, aiming to corrupt AI chatbots.

https://thebulletin.org/2025/03/russian-networks-flood-the-i...

Try finding an example from grok that proves this corruption works?

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