> Whereas I often see people treat Wikipedia, posts on AskHistorians, YouTube videos, studies from advocacy groups, and other questionable sources as if they can be relied on.
One of these things is not like the others! Almost always, when I see somebody claiming Wikipedia is wrong about something, it's because they're some kind of crackpot. I find errors in Wikipedia several times a year; probably the majority of my contribution history to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Kragen consists of me correcting errors in it. Occasionally my correction is incorrect, so someone corrects my correction. This happens several times a decade.
By contrast, I find many YouTube videos and studies from advocacy groups to be full of errors, and there is no mechanism for even the authors themselves to correct them, much less for someone else to do so. (I don't know enough about posts on AskHistorians to comment intelligently, but I assume that if there's a major factual error, the top-voted comments will tell you so—unlike YouTube or advocacy-group studies—but minor errors will generally remain uncorrected; and that generally only a single person's expertise is applied to getting the post right.)
But none of these are in the same league as LLM output, which in my experience usually contains more falsehoods than facts.
One of these things is not like the others! Almost always, when I see somebody claiming Wikipedia is wrong about something, it's because they're some kind of crackpot. I find errors in Wikipedia several times a year; probably the majority of my contribution history to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Kragen consists of me correcting errors in it. Occasionally my correction is incorrect, so someone corrects my correction. This happens several times a decade.
By contrast, I find many YouTube videos and studies from advocacy groups to be full of errors, and there is no mechanism for even the authors themselves to correct them, much less for someone else to do so. (I don't know enough about posts on AskHistorians to comment intelligently, but I assume that if there's a major factual error, the top-voted comments will tell you so—unlike YouTube or advocacy-group studies—but minor errors will generally remain uncorrected; and that generally only a single person's expertise is applied to getting the post right.)
But none of these are in the same league as LLM output, which in my experience usually contains more falsehoods than facts.