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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

It’s true that they are only as good as their input data, but the same is true if you do your own web searches.

When you do your own web searches, you learn to trust certain signals over others. You learn which sources are trustworthy and which are suspicious. LLMs don’t do that, and they present every information to you as being equally valid.

I know within a second whether the search result I am looking at is obvious AI slop (search for almost any health condition, recipe, esoteric questions etc almost always have slop at the top of the result), but LLMs regularly source those sites as the basis for conclusions.

>I know within a second

I am sorry to be pedantic, but the correct phrasing would be "I think I know within a second", which seems like a pretty important distinction.

Sure and thats fair, there's probably many things that are good enough that I miss, but I'm talking about the most obvious possible websites being used regularly as sources in web search. Identifying poor sourcing or misinformation on the internet and what is a credible source has been a lifelong skill I've had to build from the early days of the web, and in the AI boom its only gotten more necessary to be able to not get taken by hucksters with billion dollar budgets.

Not quite.

The difference is in rate of generation.

Today, the ratio of good data to slop has dropped. Previously, you couldn't mass produce websites and have content ready to go at a click.

So you had better hit ratios before, and you have worse hit ratios now. The more labour intensive to create content, you lived in a better world.

Hmm, The better the ratio of creating content to verifying content, the better the environment we live in.

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