There’s a real difference in scale and perceived authority: false search results already cause problems but many people have also been learning not to blindly trust the first hit and to check things like the site hosting it.

That’s not perfect but I think it’s a lot better than building things into Word will be. There’s almost no chance that people won’t trust suggestions there more than random web searches and the quality of the writing will make people more inclined to think it’s authoritative.

Consider what happened earlier this year when professor Tyler Cowen wrote an entire blog post on a fake citation. He certainly knows better but it’s so convenient to use the LLM emission rather than do more research…

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/internet-archive-p...