This seems really short-sighted. Why would I go to How Stuff Works when I can just ask the LLM myself?

Maybe there’s just no possible business model for them anymore with the advent of LLMs, but at least if they focused on the “actually written by humans!” angle there’d be some hook to draw people in.

The thing is, the LLM doesn't actually know anything, and lies about it.

So you go to How Stuff Works now, and you get bullshit lies instead of real information, you'll also get nonsense that looks like language at first glance, but is gibberish pretending to be an article. Because sometimes the language model changes topics midway through and doesn't correct, because it can't correct. It doesn't actually know what it's saying.

See, these language models are pre-trained, that the P in chatGPT. They just regurgitate the training data, but put together in ways that sort of look like more of the same training data.

There are some hard coded filters and responses, but other than that, nope, just a spew of garbage out from the random garbage in.

And yet, all sorts of people think this shit is ready to take over writing duties for everyone, saving money and winning court cases.

The thing is, the LLM doesn’t actually know anything, and lies about it.

Just like your average human journalist. If you ever read an article from not specialist journal on a topic you are familiar with - you know. This seems actually where LLM are very similar to how human brain works - if we don’t know something, we come up with some bullshit.