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   Cassandra Granade (cgranade@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 23-Mar-2023 03:40:06 JST Cassandra Granade

   If I ask a search engine how old the earth is, and I get a link to Answers in Genesis saying "6,000 years," then I've learned a true and correct fact: namely, that AiG claims to believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

   That's in essence the promise that search engines make when you ask factual questions, that they will deliver you relevant evidence to support "x claims to believe y." Thus, I always learn something from searching even if it's of limited utility.

   If I ask an LLM how old the Earth is and get back 6,000 years, I've learned jack shit. In that hypothetical, it just spat back nonsense without providing me any information at all. That also means that I don't learn anything when an LLM is correct, either — there's no distinction I can use to separate those two cases, making LLMs useless to any sort of epistemology.

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     Cassandra Granade (cgranade@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Thursday, 23-Mar-2023 03:40:49 JST Cassandra Granade

     in reply to

     On its own, that's fine! Plenty of useful things aren't useful in an epistemological sense. It does make it very weird to see LLMs used as a source of truth, though, even if a only as a secondary or tertiary one.

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