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points by yreg 2 days ago | 0 comments
Wikipedia is a tertiary source. Its editors are parroting secondary sources. (No disrespect intended.) There's no reason why LLMs couldn't be good at that.

I would rather be worried about the quality of all the primary and secondary sources going forward.

[–] kzrdude 2 days ago
There is a reason why LLMs can not be good at this: They don't know what they are quoting or citing. A different kind of model with factoid provenance could do it?
[–] derektank 2 days ago
>They don't know what they are quoting or citing.

What do you mean by this? I have passed very large documents into LLMs and they are able to accurately extract quotes and identify their location in the source documents. I don’t see any reason to think that they couldn’t accurately quote from and cite existing literature.

[–] kzrdude 2 days ago
LLMs cook up new sentences based on probability, based on everything in their training and their context. There's just nothing in their model that traces provenance of facts, they physically don't store that information. Once they have written a sentence, they can't tell you from which work they got this information.

There are tools where they try to retroactively add references, the LLM interfaces try to do this, but it's usually inaccurate.

I think of the way a scientific article works. "The sky is blue (Pearson, 1992)." The writer is fully aware what the factual statement is and which publication supports it (not just that, but which kind of publication - primary, secondary source, peer reviewed?). An LLM can try to imitate this, but the actual information to support this does not exist in its training.

[–] clord 2 days ago
They can. I had one doing original OCR of a scanned piece yesterday. It found relevant page numbers and understood the context. It read the whole book to find the relevant cites. Even went though the genealogy table and found ground breaking references no one noticed before. Total cost under 5 dollars and time was less than 20 mins.

The hallucination era is rapidly ending.

[–] hahn-kev 2 days ago
People reading a source can't know if it's true just by reading it either (though they could be fairly sure if it's false sometimes)
[–] kzrdude 2 days ago
That's not how academic literature works. The structure is like this: Statement (Citation). The citation is not an affirmation of truth but a content declaration; this statement is supported by this publication. The receipts are there, so that you can trace the argumentation and make your own conclusions if necessary.

'Knowledge' formed this way is a living, evolving graph, and sometimes links are broken (findings are reevaluated or disproven); having the content declaration so clearly in the open makes it easier to deal with this evolving landscape.

[–] Cthulhu_ 2 days ago
Sure they can, as long as they can access online resources they can give you an exact list of sources they're using in their responses.