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Comment by dmortin | Hacker News Reader

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dmortin

There should be some warning if some "fact" is only supported by one or very few obscure sources.

The strength of the sources should be clearly indicated in the answers to help users gauge how trustworthy the info is.

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But you can still just generate any arbitrary amount of information to support the ‘fact’

LLMs are very good at this clearly

The strength of the sources are not a question of quantity. A hundred obscure blog post have not the same strength as one wikipedia link, because the latter is more trustworthy. There could be some indication beside the info showing the strength of the sources (how many major trustworthy sources support it, etc.).

Seems like a tall order to do that for literally everything.

I guess there’ll be some guy at google going through every blog and saying whether it’s reliable or not?

This is what Google has been doing, via various methods, for 25 years.

And obviously it’s not working for the LLM as a commodity world

That's exactly what PageRank is about, invented by Google.

We've been down this road when backlinks ran the game. It eventually ends with parasitic hosting. Find a domain with authority and spam whatever mis information or spam you'd like AI to run there. Or buy a domain that has trust already. Or for the darker hats just literally hack the site and use cloaking to send fake info to the AI bot. It's probably already being done.

Everything old is new again when you start a new market. If you think that AI is bad imagine what old tricks are new with polymarkets

We need a 2026 version of PageRank, some fully game-theory-maxed transitive trust model. And we need it a few years ago already.

There is no one scalar tell it all when it comes to trust.

It does sometimes flag up sources, and when it does, the sources are often laughable (Reddit threads, or the vendor's own website [in response to an evaluation rather than factual question], or an AI generated SEO blog for some low profile company in a barely even adjacent industry). Sad considering what Google's origins were...

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