The "double check" mechanism for medications is: We tell people not to take medical advice from anyone who is not trained in medicine.
This is not a new problem. The internet has been full of nonsense since the 1990s (at least). Gossip and malicious rumors are as old as language.
It is not realistic to stop the generation of nonsense (of the malicious or the stupid sort). We should train people to detect and ignore nonsense when they hear it.
This advice is inadequate and impractical. Most people don't have access to doctors who spend enough time on them to really get to the bottom of all issues.
In most countries, there are simply too many patients per doctor, meaning it's a conveyor belt of "good enough" 5 minute appointments.
People will turn to other modes of discussing and analyzing their problems if they go to professionals repeatedly and the problem still isn't solved. Just telling them not to do so or to ignore 100% of it isn't going to solve that.
> It is not realistic to stop the generation of nonsense (of the malicious or the stupid sort).
Seems like a big statement. Why is it not realistic? People are already doing it manually by having one LLM fact check output from another.
The difference is back then we had the adage "don't believe everything you read online" that helped adjust our priors. Today, however, these companies are specifically marketing themselves as the source of ground truth. Your boss, or your school that a generation ago banned wikipedia, is now demanding you to use these tools and make the work dependent on them.
This is not a new problem. The internet has been full of nonsense since the 1990s (at least). Gossip and malicious rumors are as old as language.
It is not realistic to stop the generation of nonsense (of the malicious or the stupid sort). We should train people to detect and ignore nonsense when they hear it.