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Re:Oops! We Automated Bullshit by latexr on Friday November 17, 2023 @09:16AM (#38303858)
> I'd first ask it to provide a list of the top ten reasons reputable historians cite as primary causes of World War One.

And right here you could bump into problems, because how would you know if what you got back is really the opinion of reputable historians? For all you know it could be giving you the opinions of a layman on Reddit.

> Then, go to Google Scholar or similar and look up that document and see what different reputable historians have said about it.

Looks like that could’ve been the first step. Identify the reputable historians and go from there.

Re:Oops! We Automated Bullshit by photochemsyn on Friday November 17, 2023 @10:26AM (#38304846)
That's a good suggestion but I'd do both, e.g. "Provide a list of ten well-known and reputable historians who specialize in the history of the Great War and its origins."

Now there might be outliers that are missing from both lists but which might be worth looking at, as it's not that unusual for consensus viewpoints to be overturned by new information and so on, and that's not something LLMs are likely to be very helpful with.

Fundamentally, my point is that if skeptical thinking, rational analysis, research strategies etc. aren't taught to people from a young age than it really doesn't matter whether the BS they're subjected to is human-generated or AI-generated.