How do you deal with that? Do you try to tell them about hallucinations and that LLMs have no concept of true or false? Or do you just let them be? What do you do when they do that in a conversation with you or encounter LLMs being used as a source for something that affects you?
However, if I notice a friend is about to harm themselves in some way I’ll pull open their ChatGPT and show them directly how sycophantic it is by going completely 180 on what they prompted. It’s enough to make them second guess. I also correct people who say “he or she” when referring to an LLM to say “it” in dialog, and explain that it’s a tool, like a calculator. So gentle reframing has helped.
Sometimes I’ll ask them to pause and ask their gut first, but people are already disconnected from their own truths.
It’s going to be bumpy. Save your mental health.
I'm saying that because they were not going to be critical of the search results, and google is not exactly showing objective truth in the first positions nowadays.
I treat the LLM like a diety. Every sane person understands well enough that the Bible is not to be taken literally. And then when someone talks about using LLMs, I always rephrase that as prayer.
LLMs aren't a special case to me. Glue doesn't belong on pizza and you shouldn't eat one rock a day but we've been giving and getting bad advice forever. The person needs to take ownership for the output and getting it right, no matter the source, is their responsibility.
Like most things that go mainstream it will take a good while before people understand, by which point they will have learnt a lot of things that aren't true and they will never let them go. We might get a healthy use of current AI at some point in the future or if the product drastically improves.
All you can do now is hold them to the same standard you normally would, if you catch them lying whether an AI did it or not its their responsibility and you treat them accordingly.
I doubt you can stop them from asking machines for answers. What you can do is aide them to learn how to distrust the answers competently, but outside their field of knowledge, applying skepticism is hard.
The irony of Gell-Mann Amnesia is that Michael Chrichton, who is said to have named it, suffered from it badly: Wrote well within his field, misapplied sciences to write well outside it, and said things which were indefensible.
As a test I just did exactly what you said in a Claude Opus 4.6 session about another HN thread. Claude considered* the contradiction, evaluated additional sources, and responded backing up its original claim with more evidence.
I will add that I use a system prompt that explicitly discourages sycophancy, but this is a single sentence expression of preference and not an indication of fundamental model weakness.
* I’ll leave the anthropomorphism discussions to Searle; empirically this is the observed output.
It's not actually realizing anything so much as it's following your lead. Yes, followup questions can help dislodge more information, but fundamentally you can accidentally or on purpose bully an LLM to contradict itself quite easily, and it is only incidentally about correctness.
If you full throttle a BWM1000 S RR for a split of a second,at 30mph first gear, it will self eject beneath you. If you do that, for any length of time, you're dead. Do the same on a 50cc motorbike and not much will happen. Even for extended periods of time, not much would happen. You could hold it down until you run out of fuel or the universe gets cold and die, not much would happen.
You see, it's not that they are lazy. Or they haven't put any amount of time into understanding how llms operate. Again I am sorry, most people are not capable, at all, of understanding what is happening at inference time. Most developers, nerds, hackers, who do understand how computers operate, cannot really grasp the basics of what an llm is or what the f is going on. Imagine the average guy, your lawyer, the MBA type of person.
I firmly believe that every single person on this entire planet has a depth to them that far, far exceeds anything an LLM could even begin to approximate. I'm sorry you're in a position that you can't see that at all - that each and every one of them feel happiness and sadness and love and hate and fear and rage and inspiration and passion and are utterly human. I hope you see it someday.
Look I get your sentiment. Sometimes it feels like you're the only thinking, conscious being. Surrounded by beings who fundamentally cannot understand that A –> B does not imply B –> A. Beings that say things that are so obviously non-sequiturs or contradictory.
But calling people NPCs is the most NPC thing you can do. There is more to people than logical reasoning and these things often impede or completely block reasoning. Very intelligent people sometimes say the most grotesque things. People turn mad and mad people sometimes get their head set straight.
Sometimes it's not so much about the pure ability to reason but the goal of that person and whether they see understanding something or trying to understand it as helpful towards that goal.
I do agree though that the more intelligent someone is the less likely it is that other things will block their intelligent ability and the harder it is for them to fool themselves into believing absurd nonsense and to blind themselves from apparent truth.
Sometimes after talking with someone – or rather trying to but ending up only talking to them because they just do not manage to understand what I'm saying or to engage with it in any way – I wonder how they manage to get through every day life as that requires solving way more complex practical problems. Yet they do.
"Tell me about all the potential pitfalls of blindly trusting LLM output, and relate a couple or three true stories about when LLM misinformation has gone badly wrong for people."
It usually involves some form of "well, no, hold on..."
I didn't tell her why LLMs can make mistakes or hallucinate because I thought that she would not appreciate my mansplaining.
Looking forward though, my boring answer would still be education. It is going to take time. But without understanding LLMs, they will not be easily persuaded.
A: Why is drinking coffee every day so good for you?
B: Why is drinking coffee every day so bad for you?
Question A responds that it has "several health benefits", antioxidants, liver health, reduced risk of diabetes and Parkinson's.
Question B responds that it may lead to sleep disruption, digestive issues, risk of osteoporosis.
Same question. One word difference. Two different directions.
This makes me take everything with a pinch of salt when I ask "Would Library A be a good fit for Problem X" - which is obviously a bit leading; I don't even trust what I hope are more neutral inputs like "How does Library A apply to Problem Space X", for example.
Good:
> The research is generally positive but it’s not unconditionally “good for you” — the framing matters.
> What the evidence supports for moderate consumption (3-5 cups/day): lower risk of type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s, certain liver diseases (including liver cancer), and all-cause mortality……
Bad:
> The premise is off. Moderate daily coffee consumption (3-5 cups) isn’t considered bad for you by current medical consensus. It’s actually associated with reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s, and some liver diseases in large epidemiological studies.
> Where it can cause problems: Heavy consumption (6+ cups) can lead to anxiety, insomnia……
This isn’t just my own one-off examples. Claude dominates the BSBench: https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...
Is this something you can control or is this outside your control?
This of course doesn’t apply to high-stakes settings. In these cases I find LLMs are still a great information retrieval approach, but it’s a starting point to manual vetting.
Now they got another "God" in LLM.
How to deal? Just ignore. There is way more stupid people with stupid opinions than we can possibly estimate.
Some comments here equating it to people who blindly believe things on the internet, but it's worse than that. Many previously rational people essentially getting hypnotized by LLM use and loosing touch of their rational thinking.
It's concerning to watch.
Ask AI to cite sources and then investigate the sources, or have another agent fact check the relevancy of the sources.
You can use this thing called ralph that let's you burn a lot of tokens at scale by simply having a detailed prompt work on a task and refining something from different lenses. It too AI about an hour to write: https://nexivibe.com/avoid.civil.war.web/
I do this on things that I know very well, and the moment I let it cook and iterate, collect feedback, the results become chef's kiss.
The agentic era that we are in is... very interesting.
It's incredible watching people determine that outsourcing their thinking and work to what has been generously described as a junior coworker is a new 'skill'. Words are losing their meaning, on multiple levels.
Claude max-x20 is $2,400 a year.
I talk to the computer like a person to get the computer to do things that humans used to do. Having managed people before, I'm going all in on AI.
These people may be idiots who are impossible to reason with, but at least for now the LLMs have not been completely driven into the ground by SEO. They might actually be getting a taste of what it feels like to not be an idiot. I'm happy for them, but they'll snap out of it when their trust is broken. It's probably sometime soon anyway.
So I said, don't ever trust the output of an LLM without verification. However this caused me some hassle with the AI adoption manager. We have minimum-use AI KPI's for employees and he asked me to stop saying these things or people will use it less.
In the end I just hated the company a little bit more. I'm just sick of fighting against idiot. And he does have a point, our leadership is pretty crazy about the AI hype, they want everyone to be on it all the time.
chipgap98•1h ago
atomicnumber3•1h ago
sodapopcan•1h ago
al_borland•1h ago
I’ve seen some people quote AI like you’re saying. However, when I preface something with “ChatGPT said…”, my intention is to convey to the listener that they should take it with a grain of salt, as it might be completely bull shit. I suppose I should consider who I’m talking to when I make that assumption.
ACow_Adonis•1h ago
And if you previously were unaware of the insanity and irrationality passing under the surface of such human activity, I guess it can come as a bit of a shock :)
heliumtera•1h ago
It happened with science, politics, traditional media, history books, "good engineering practices" applied to IT, OOP,tdd,DDD,server side rendering, containerization... Literally every bullshit shilled to the moon is accepted without second guessing and you would be without a job, in an asylum, for questioning 2 of them in a row.
Why is it different now? EVERYTHING is bullshit, only attention matters. And craftsmanship.
soopypoos•40m ago
basilikum•1h ago
chipgap98•1h ago
ares623•1h ago
sbinnee•1h ago