One extreme of the scale is: “Compared to the average reader of the article, I had no more knowledge when I started writing it. All my information comes from the LLM—whether it is true or a hallucination, I have no way to check, and I probably wouldn’t notice even huge errors that would be immediately obvious to anyone who had actually studied the topic.”
The other extreme of the scale is: “I am an expert on the topic, and sometimes I write about these things or teach them. I used LLM to review my article, and add some specific details that I didn’t remember, but all those added details seem correct and match my previous knowledge.”
The disclaimer makes it sound like it’s the latter… but looking at the mistakes other commenters have found, it is the former.
The intended understanding of those words was “I knew almost nothing about this subject when I started researching this, and used LLMs to find most of the stuff I read to write this post.” If there’s an expert on solar flare grid reliability on LessWrong, I would very much appreciate they write a post about it—the reason I wrote this in the first place is because, given the breadth of the estimated disaster and the likelihood past studies have attributed to solar storms (e.g. Lloyd’s), it seemed weird to me that LW was lacking a post trying to get to the bottom of this. Note I don’t think I would’ve made fewer errors in this post had I relied on Google to find sources instead. I think my mistake was not emailing any experts at all, despite that being an available move.
How should I understand these words?
One extreme of the scale is: “Compared to the average reader of the article, I had no more knowledge when I started writing it. All my information comes from the LLM—whether it is true or a hallucination, I have no way to check, and I probably wouldn’t notice even huge errors that would be immediately obvious to anyone who had actually studied the topic.”
The other extreme of the scale is: “I am an expert on the topic, and sometimes I write about these things or teach them. I used LLM to review my article, and add some specific details that I didn’t remember, but all those added details seem correct and match my previous knowledge.”
The disclaimer makes it sound like it’s the latter… but looking at the mistakes other commenters have found, it is the former.
The intended understanding of those words was “I knew almost nothing about this subject when I started researching this, and used LLMs to find most of the stuff I read to write this post.” If there’s an expert on solar flare grid reliability on LessWrong, I would very much appreciate they write a post about it—the reason I wrote this in the first place is because, given the breadth of the estimated disaster and the likelihood past studies have attributed to solar storms (e.g. Lloyd’s), it seemed weird to me that LW was lacking a post trying to get to the bottom of this. Note I don’t think I would’ve made fewer errors in this post had I relied on Google to find sources instead. I think my mistake was not emailing any experts at all, despite that being an available move.