The reason verifiability is important is because humans can be incentivized to be truthful and factual. We know we lie, but we also know we can produce verifiable information, and we prefer this to lies, so when it matters, we make the cost to lying high enough that we can reasonably expect that they will not try to deceive (for example by committing perjury, or fabricating research data). We know it still happens, but it’s not widespread and we can adjust the rules, definitions and cost to adapt.

An LLM does not have such real world limitations. It will hallucinate nonstop and then create layers of gaslighting explanations to its hallucinations. The problem is that you absolutely must be a domain expert at the LLM’s topic or always go find the facts elsewhere to verify (then why use an LLM?).

So a company like Google using an LLM, is not providing information, it’s doing the opposite. It is making it more difficult and time consuming to find information. But it is then hiding their responsibility behind the model. “We didn’t present bad info, our model did, we’re sorry it told you to turn your recipe into poison…models amirite?”

A human doing that could likely face some consequences.