As a sceptic and critical thinker I have questioned the claims about LLMs and call them exactly that, LLMs. they are not A.I.
I have spent substantial time researching how to make use of them, and how they work. Some of this has being made visible within talk.tiddlywiki
If you totally ignore the positive hype, the doomsdayers and the overly critical, you find they are a powerful tool, but like any tool, a trusted friend, or any human expert, you need to be vigilant, sceptical, critical.
- Because of this never use it to publish something you yourself do not know without validation. This is the strong argument supporting discouraging raw LLM answers here.
You also discover that asking the right questions, the new art/science of “prompt engineering” is the main determinant of the effectiveness of LLM’s. It would be unwise to emphasise too heavily that LLM’s produce bullshit, because it may imply your questions were bullshit. GIGO
To put it another way, just as search engines help us gain access to a large “corpus” of knowledge, or querying a “Data Warehouse”, LLM’s provide us another avenue to query a larger less curated corpus of knowledge. But, by their nature they require even more sceptical, critical and validation especially when outside your own knowledge domain.
- Despite this they remain a powerful tool, or subjective framework, to seek and manage knowledge.